A Tribute to Dorothy Bryant

Dorothy Bryant (1930–2017) was a brilliant writer whose work deserves much more attention. She excelled both as a novelist and a playwright. My favorites of her works are the prophetic fantasy novel, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You; her work of historical fiction, Confessions of Madame Psyche; and the play Dear Master. Dorothy’s complete works span twelve novels, seven plays, and two books of nonfiction. She explored an amazing array of genres, including historical fiction and drama, fantasy, mystery, criticism, and realistic novels set in the present day. 

Dorothy Bryant

I met Dorothy in 1994 when I was working on the first English translation of Horace, a novel by George Sand. I was trying to find a voice in English that was the equivalent of Sand’s sculpted French prose. Dorothy had written the deeply moving play Dear Master, based on the correspondence between George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, where she created authentic conversations in English between those writers. I sought out Dorothy’s guidance and support. She was an incredibly kind and encouraging mentor, and a spellbinding and witty storyteller in conversation. 

She was born Dorothy Mae Calvetti to an Italian-American immigrant family in San Francisco’s Mission District. Dorothy grew up in a working-class household where her father ran a small gas station and her mother was a homemaker and office worker.

Dorothy (left) with sister Rose

She attended Mission High School, where she felt she did not have the most rigorous education. She longed to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley, the leading public university on the West Coast. But Dorothy’s older sister Rose had gone there and did not finish a degree, and their parents did not want to risk a repeat. They told Dorothy they would only pay for her to attend San Francisco State College (now University). Dorothy, who loved piano, applied there and majored in music, graduating in 1950. She particularly enjoyed playing the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach. I wonder if Dorothy’s skill in creating dialogue was shaped by the Bach of the Two-Part Inventions.

After graduating from college, Dorothy began teaching at the age of 23. She and her first husband, Lou Ungaretti, already had a son and daughter. In the late 1950s, Dorothy taught Music and English in San Francisco at Lick-Wilmerding High School, which then only admitted boys. Dorothy also led the glee club there and wrote the music and lyrics for the school plays.

Dorothy Bryant teaching at Lick-Wilmerding High School, 1950s

She went back to San Francisco State College and earned a Master’s degree in Creative Writing in 1964. Dorothy then taught at Contra Costa Community College for many years, and created that campus’ first Black history course. Dorothy was a beloved instructor. She wrote in her novel Anita, Anita, “… nothing is so intoxicating as teaching. It is the closest thing to loving… ”

Dorothy began her literary career with the novel Ella Price’s Journal, published in 1972 by a major press, Lippincott. That book was way ahead of its time in taking seriously the struggles of married women who worked in the home.

 

By virtue of that success, Dorothy was able to get a literary agent, who then read the manuscript of her second novel, The Comforter, later retitled The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You. But the agent flatly refused to represent her book. He told Dorothy, “I don’t want to show this to anybody because I don’t want to prejudice publishers against you.” Because of his negative reaction, Dorothy gave up on sending the book to editors. On the recommendation of her second husband, Bob Bryant, she decided to self-publish it, calling her publishing company Ata Books, after the fantasy world in the novel. The book sold out its first run within two years, and Random House approached Dorothy to reprint it. Their one caveat was that they wanted to change the title to The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, a phrase from the book, and Dorothy agreed.

Dorothy Bryant with son John and husband Bob Bryant at John’s college graduation, 1972

A pioneering work of the fantasy genre, The Kin of Ata depicts a world where happiness is measured not by material success or status, but by how harmonious a person’s dreams are. This farseeing book has become a classic and has stayed in print for 50 years. It remains Dorothy’s best-known work.

Following that difficult experience with the agent, Dorothy elected to self-publish almost all her subsequent books. They span an incredible range of settings, subjects, and genres, from the epistolary novel Prisoners; to her mystery Killing Wonder; to Confessions of Madame Psyche, an exploration of the craze for seances that a hard-luck young woman exploits in the San Francisco of the era of the great earthquake of 1906. Confessions of Madame Psyche won the 1987 American Book Award. To replace the role of editor, Dorothy relied on friends such as Anne Fox to critique her self-published manuscripts.

 

Dorothy began writing for the stage with her play Dear Master. The original 1991 production featured the stellar cast of Barbara Oliver as George Sand, and Ken Grantham as Gustave Flaubert. The play was so well received that it launched Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre, named for George Sand’s actual given name, Aurore. Dorothy’s husband Bob Bryant, a contractor, built the seating and stage for the theater in Berkeley’s historic City Club, designed by architect Julia Morgan.

Barbara Oliver as George Sand and Ken Grantham as Gustave Flaubert
in Dorothy Bryant’s Dear Master

Someone recently asked me who were some of my favorite playwrights, and I named Tom Stoppard, Jez Butterworth, and Dorothy Bryant. I included Dorothy primarily on the basis of Dear Master, because in that play she takes the static material of a written correspondence between two writers and turns it into the most moving and memorable drama about a literary friendship that explores deep questions about life.

Dorothy’s other plays also focused on historical topics, including The Trial of Cornelia Connelly. The plot revolves around the stranger-than-fiction case of a woman in the 1840s whose husband deposits her in a nunnery so he can become a priest. When the husband changes his mind a year later and tries to reclaim his wife, she refuses. The husband then goes to court to force his wife to return.

 

As with all of Dorothy’s historical fiction and dramas, she meticulously researched The Trial of Cornelia Connelly. She often traveled to verify sites and events in her works. For her historical romance novel Anita, Anita, based on the life of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s wife, Dorothy retraced the couple’s epic journey from Brazil to Uruguay to Italy. Neither of those historical projects brought Dorothy wealth or fame, but I greatly admire that she followed her literary passions and interests, regardless of whether they led to popular successes.

 

Dorothy Bryant was also no stranger to controversy in her literary career. Before feminism became fashionable, Dorothy was outspoken in her depiction of the challenges of women. She also created sympathetic working-class characters of a kind rarely seen in post-World War II U.S. fiction. Her nonfiction includes Writing a Novel, a book on the writing process; and Literary Lynching, a survey of unofficial censorship by groups of readers

 

Dorothy was hardly one to toe the party line. She was just as tough on hypocrisy on the left as she was on elitism on the right. In that sense, Dorothy Bryant reminds me a great deal of George Orwell. She was not afraid to call it as she saw it, no matter who might take offense. Dorothy Bryant’s willingness to disregard accepted dogmas and to aim always for the complex truth is much needed in our current intellectual landscape.

 

Many thanks to Dorothy Bryant’s daughter Lorri Ungaretti for providing much of the information in this blog.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Translating George Sand

I’ve always admired the French writer and activist George Sand (1804–1876). She was a prolific author and a dedicated advocate for social change who fought for the rights of women and workers. 

George Sand

Currently Sand is far better known in the English-speaking world for her audacious life than for her writing. Sand had many lovers, both men and women, including the composer Frédéric Chopin; bad-boy poet and playwright Alfred de Musset; and Prosper Mérimée, author of Carmen. George Sand was notorious for cross-dressing as a man in order to attend the Paris theaters that were only open to males.

George Sand:  Prolific Author

Sand (whose real name was the Baroness Amantine Lucile Aurore Dudevant) was a workhorse as an author. Also highly social, she entertained guests during the afternoon and evening, then wrote most of the night. There is a story about George Sand, perhaps apocryphal, that she finished writing one novel halfway through the night, and not willing to lose valuable time, she started another one without a pause. Whether this anecdote is true or not, it says a lot about her reputation as a hardworking author.

George Sand painted by her friend Eugène Delacroix

Finding the Right Work to Translate

I was, to be frank, more than a little in love with George Sand. Not owning a time machine, I decided the best way to get close to her was to translate one of her works. But which to pick of her 100 novels, plays, and memoirs? I couldn’t read them all. Most of her plays were untranslated, so I started there. But I soon realized that the theater in nineteenth century Paris was a lot like network television was before streaming. It was a popular form of entertainment where the standards were fairly low, and not much revision or planning went into the throwaway scripts.

Many of George Sand’s most renowned novels had already been translated either during the first wave of interest in her work in the nineteenth century, or during the recent feminist revival. The majority of her prose works felt dated to me, sentimental portraits of virtuous peasants. The fact that she was renowned in France as a great stylist, the mentor of Gustave Flaubert, a writer’s writer, was not coming across to me. I started to wonder if there was a translation project involving George Sand that would make sense for me.  

Searching for Clues When Looking for a Work to Translate

I was combing through various biographies of Sand, looking for a glimmer of a translation project. I came across a reference to an obscure novel of hers titled Horace. The biography mentioned that Sand’s publisher had absolutely refused to accept the manuscript when she presented it to him in the early 1840s, despite the fact that Sand was then a best-selling author. That sparked my curiosity.

I did some more digging and found another interesting clue. The French publisher Éditions de l’Aurore, which was undertaking a major project to reprint most of Sand’s works, chose Horace as the second book in their series, ahead of almost all of her most famous novels. I immediately ordered the French edition of the book.

When I read George Sand’s Horace, I found it charming, witty, and amazingly farsighted politically. It reflected the real world that Sand lived in: the banter in aristocratic Paris boudoirs, and the arguments in gritty Left Bank student garrets about overthrowing the corrupt monarchy. I knew I had the book I wanted to translate, and even better—it had gone untranslated into English since Sand had essentially self-published the book 150 years before.

Finding a Voice That Sounds Right for a Nineteenth-Century Novel

I immediately went on a sort of literary diet in order to get into my mind the voice of a nineteenth century woman novelist. For two years, while I was creating the first draft of the translation of George Sand’s Horace, I read only novels by English women writers. It was a delicious bubble bath of books, including Persuasion by Jane Austen, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, and Mary Barton by Edith Gaskell. Reading all of those books helped me to get the right diction, tone, and viewpoint for the translation. Somehow, though, none of those novelists quite reminded me of George Sand’s sardonic Paris salon humor. It wasn’t until I read William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair that I found a voice in English that matched Sand’s urbane and urban voice in Horace.

I created a first draft of the translation in a style that was as close as I could get to the diction of a nineteenth century novel. I sent the book to someone I trusted, Tom Christensen, then editor in chief at Mercury House, a fine literary publisher near where I lived in San Francisco. Tom accepted the book, but he asked to meet with me about the translation.

“The translation is fine as far as it goes,” Tom said, “but it’s stilted, it’s stiff. You can’t write this as if you lived in the nineteenth century.” I realized Tom was right. I had fossilized George Sand’s language in diction that wasn’t natural to me, an idiom that didn’t exist any longer.

I completely rewrote the translation, using phrasing that was much closer to contemporary English. When I was reading the nineteenth century novels, I had compiled a list of contractions that were actually in use during that time, such as can’t and don’t. In the new version of the translation, I used those contractions every chance I could, both for the narrator’s voice and for dialogue. Proudly I brought my revision to Tom Christensen.

His reaction wasn’t what I was hoping for. “It sounds too contemporary,” he said. “You need a voice that seems like the nineteenth century, but actually uses some modern phrases. There has to be a balance.”

My third draft was somewhere in the middle—neither purely contemporary nor completely archaic. I only used contractions for the dialogue and very sparingly in the narration. That middle version satisfied Tom.

How the Translation of Horace Was Received

I was fortunate that my translation of George Sand’s Horace was the first to appear in English after the release of the popular movie Impromptu, a George Sand biopic starring Judy Davis. Horace got written up twice in ten days in the New York Times, and the first printing sold out in eight weeks, almost unheard of for a translation of an unknown nineteenth century novel. The English translation of Horace remains in print more than thirty years later.

A Favorite Passage from Horace

Here’s a favorite passage from the novel, where George Sand talks about students and how they become less radical as they grow older and more cautious:

“…we regard as youthful foolishness those courageous theories that we once loved and professed; we blush at the thought of having been a Fourierist, a Saint-Simonian, or a revolutionary of any stripe; we hardly dare recount what audacious motions we put forward or supported in political groups; and finally, we are astonished that we ever hoped for equality with all its consequences, that we loved the people fearlessly, that we voted for the law of brotherhood with no amendments. And after a few years—that is, when we’re well or poorly established—whether we be right smack in the middle, royalist, or republican, of the shade of opinion of the Débats, the Gazette, or the National, we inscribe over our doorway, or on our diploma, or on our license, that we never, in all our life, intended to commit any offense against sacrosanct Property.”

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Reading What You Want to Write

One of the best ways to put yourself in the right mind frame to create a certain type of writing is to read works in that same mold. For instance, if you plan to write formal poetry, read formal poetry. If you plan to write a novel in the voice of a female, first-person speaker, read books that have a similar narrator. The advantage is not just that you have a model to imitate. I believe it actually affects your brain to read certain types of literary works.

The so-called “Mozart Effect” was announced by researchers in a letter to Nature magazine in 1993, claiming to show that the IQs of test subjects spiked upwards after listening to ten minutes of Mozart. I believe from my own experience that listening to complex music such as classical or jazz can energize the creative sectors of the brain. I also feel that my own ability to write in a literary way increases when I read or listen to good books. There may well be biochemical changes that happen in our brains when we read or listen to certain kinds of writing.

I experienced the benefits of this myself when I was trying to translate George Sand’s novel Horace from French to English. 

George Sand

It took me about two years to translate this remarkable novel, written in the 1840s, and so far ahead of its time in its treatment of the rights of women and working people. During the two years I was working on that translation, I read almost exclusively novels by nineteenth century authors, mainly women. I was trying to get into my head an English voice that I felt would be an equivalent to George Sand’s narrative.

What an amazing education and privilege that was, to read Persuasion by Jane Austen, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, (who took part of her pen name from Sand), The Awakening by Kate Chopin, and other books. Oddly enough, though, none of those writers reminded me of the wry, urbane George Sand. The English Romanticism of the Brontës or George Eliot is more earnest and less urban than Sand’s Horace. Austen is similar—she's also a comic writer, but her world of rural Regency England is so much more innocent than the Paris of George Sand during the Romantic era of the mid-nineteenth century. The book written in English that most sounded to me like the voice of the novel Horace was William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, with its satiric look at London society.

It is possible to overdo reading what you want to write. When I was translating George Sand’s Horace, I became so immersed in Victorian diction that every sentence I wrote in English felt as though it was choking on a tightly knotted cravat. I had to back away and rewrite the translation in a more contemporary voice, and then merge the more modern version with the draft that was written in old-fashioned and formal diction. I was very much helped and guided in this process by my editor at Mercury House publishers, Tom Christensen, an accomplished author and translator, who is also a fellow editor at Catamaran Literary Reader.

But in general, I think reading what you want to write is a good rule of thumb. So unless you plan to write blogs, this is probably the place for both you and me to stop for now!

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

A Tribute to Barbara Oliver (1927–2013)

This week the San Francisco Bay Area received the very sad news that the wonderful actor, director, and arts administrator Barbara Oliver passed away on May 20, 2013. Barbara cofounded the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, California, and served as its artistic director from 1992 to 2004. This blog is dedicated to Barbara. 

                                                              Barbara Oliver

Here is a tribute to Barbara from one of her close collaborators, the writer Dorothy Bryant, author of the play Dear Master (which Barbara appeared in) and numerous novels, including the amazing The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You and Confessions of Madame Psyche.

“The idea for Aurora Theatre Company began in the late 1980s with a luncheon conversation with Barbara (just turned 60) about the paucity of plays featuring older leading ladies. In my ignorance I offered to write a two person ‘reading’ based on the friendship between George Sand and Gustave Flaubert. (I had no idea of the work and the cost of what seemed like a modest effort to fill some time before Barbara got another role with a ‘real theater.’)

“A year of research later, plus another year of mostly unpaid public readings (followed by my rewriting) by Barbara and Ken Grantham (and other actors) transformed this ‘dialogue’ into a play, performed successfully at the Berkeley City Club, (where she [Barbara] was a trusted member), and the beginning of Aurora Theatre Company. Her achievement was monumental—a fact I learned (knowing nothing about how a play went from page to stage) as we moved along. I would never have attempted such a thing without Barbara’s staunch belief that it could work, and her willingness to do these readings, her incredible savvy about climbing all the hurdles to production, her use of contacts built by solid respect for her work at Berkeley Rep and other theaters. She was totally creative and totally practical. Whenever we hit a snag that might have made others give up, she would nod thoughtfully and then work her way toward a solution.

"Thanks to her I wrote five more plays that were performed here and in other cities. Barbara had taken what had seemed like a setback and transformed it into an opportunity to display and use all of her talents, which, with her quiet, unassuming manner, few people knew she possessed. I learned a lot from her.”

My own connection with Barbara also began through the play Dear Master. I was teaching a summer literature class for high school students at UC Berkeley in 1995, and we were reading a translation I’d done of the novel Horace by George Sand, and a novella by Flaubert. To make that period come to life for the students, I persuaded the university to host a reading of Dear Master, with Barbara recreating her role as George Sand. Barbara was so moving and wise and memorable in that part. She embodied George Sand.

After that Barbara supported my efforts at playwriting, which were very rough at the beginning. I was working on a play that consisted mostly of dramatic monologues, and Barbara gently informed me at one point, “It sometimes helps if the characters talk to one another when they’re onstage.” She was infinitely patient and read draft after draft of my plays, but she never failed to let me know when I could do better—had to do better. Barbara was a fantastic and enormously generous mentor, and she had a great respect for writers.

After retiring from the Aurora Theatre, Barbara couldn’t stop developing new plays, and she founded a reading series called Four New Ones, where each year she planned to direct staged readings of plays in progress. She only got through the first year because of commitments to act and direct for other companies.

She directed several staged readings of another play of mine, Things I Didn’t Know I Loved. I admired the way that Barbara worked with the actors, choosing people she respected highly, and letting them find their way into their roles.

I had a chance this week to speak with Barbara’s daughter, Anna Oliver, who is a costume designer. Anna shared a few of her memories of her mom.

“My mom’s dad was a missionary, a Northern Baptist preacher. When she was three years old, my mom went with my grandpa and grandma to India. She came back to the U.S. when she was seven, speaking Hindi.

“When my mom was very young she used to listen the Metropolitan Opera on the radio on Sunday afternoons. She wanted to be an opera singer. It was outside the norm for the world she grew up in to go on stage.

“There were several roles she performed that she talked a lot about. Studying drama at Carnegie Tech, she played Cordelia in King Lear. One of the roles she was most challenged by but most glad she did was in The Chairs by Ionesco, at the Aurora Theatre. She also enjoyed doing The Gin Game there opposite my dad, Bill Oliver, though it was somewhat harrowing because my dad was ill.

“In her directing, she did a lot of George Bernard Shaw, and adored it. She also directed Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Aurora—that was Babs at her best. She was very happy with the production of Wilder Times [short plays by Thornton Wilder] that she directed at the Aurora in 2012. The short Wilder play The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden—a lot of that was informed by Barbara. She knew those folks.

“My mom always said that theater is a three-legged stool—the play, the production, and the audience. It can’t stand without all three of those. What struck me about her perspective was how much the audience mattered. My mom cared so much about writers and language, but theatre for her was communication to a purpose—to connect with an audience.

“She was generous and gracious, but it wasn’t all selfless. She did it because she loved the theater. She genuinely believed in the transformative power of theater.”

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 2

Another consideration for writers who want to sustain a career, is not to put all your eggs in one basket, to coin a phrase. If you focus your entire creative effort on one book, and invest years of your life in that book, it better be an incredibly good idea that you are the right person to carry out—and a book you can finish. But even if it’s the greatest idea on planet Earth, and you are the one person in the universe to write it, and you finish it, it may still not be the book that gets you published for the first time. Even if it is published, it may not be the work that finds the audience you’re seeking.

So I would advise you to work on multiple projects. Don’t count on that first book being the one that gets you in the publisher’s door. Write a second book, and after that, a third book, even if you haven’t gotten the first manuscript published yet. Especially if you haven’t gotten the first manuscript published yet.

The nineteenth century French writer George Sand wrote more than 100 books or plays. Here’s a portrait of George Sand by the great French painter Eugène Delacroix:

Sand was famous for staying up all night to write, burning many candles. Then every morning she slept in, and entertained her children and friends all afternoon and evening. There is a story that she once finished a novel halfway through the night, and instead of going to bed, she started writing another book. We could all emulate that drive. 
Of course, there are writers who write just one great book. The classic example is Harper Lee:

 Born in 1926, she has written just one book in her lifetime. That book happens to be To Kill a Mockingbird. In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize and selling more than 30 million copies, the book has changed the lives of countless people who’ve read it. If you’re Harper Lee, fine, just write that one book. No complaints. But most of us are not that sort of writer. We’ve got to keep trying, throwing out more than we keep of our writing, getting better at certain aspects of this crazy job as we go along.

I’m going to make up a person who is a composite of several different creative writing students I’ve encountered. This student is terrifically talented. Not only does she write, but she’s also an accomplished professional. In short, a person with lots of skills, including excellent people skills.

She’s been done with her MFA now for about seven years, and she hasn’t published a book yet.

Why? She’s invested years in finishing the book she started as her MFA thesis. The book is a novel with a very challenging structure. It’s a work of fiction, but based solely on nonfiction stories from her own family history. That’s a tall order to fill, since in a case like that you feel you can’t change the story, even when it doesn’t work for the reader, because it’s based on fact. The manuscript also has several main characters who live in different centuries.

It could be a fascinating structure for a novel, but maybe too challenging to pull off for a first book. It’s the kind of project that might be better to work on later in life, when the mechanics of writing a good plot and having a polished style are almost second nature. 
So I would suggest that you don’t put all your chips on one number, and play that number over and over. The odds are, you will run out of chips before that number comes up. Keep working on different projects, and increase your odds of finding the readers you seek.

 
Other recent posts about writing topics:

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer