Southern Souvenirs: Stories & Essays Sarah Haardt,Used

Product DescriptionRefocuses critical and popular attention on a nearly forgotten but important forerunner of the southern literary renascenceSara Haardts character sketches, short stories, and essays were published regularly in the leading literary and popular magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. But today she is remembered best as the wife of H. L. Mencken. Southern Souvenirs, which brings together prizewinning and previously unpublished work, reintroduces her work to scholar and general read alike, restoring her place in the pantheon of southern letters.Haardts biography alone, detailed poignantly in Ann Henleys introduction, makes for fascinating reading. Born into an uppermiddleclass family in Montgomery, Alabama, Haardt attended a progressive local school where she received the kind of college prep education typically reserved for boys. She escaped the South to Goucher College in Baltimore, returning only occasionally and briefly. Haardt and Menckens meeting at Goucher sparked a long relationship between the two, first as mentor and student, then as romantic partners, and finally as one the nations most celebrated husbandandwife teams.Although Haardt had struggled with poor health throughout her life, before her untimely death of tuberculosis in 1935, she had published widely in such magazines and journals as The Reviewer, Menckens The Smart Set, Atlantic Monthly, Bookman, and Harpers Bazaar. Her story Absolutely Perfect was among the O. Henry Prize stories for 1933; Little White Girl was included in Best Short Stories of 1935. Those stories appear here alongside others Haardt had planned to collect, and in the order she had devised, with a few exceptions and additions outlined by Henley in her introduction. Haardts stories richly evoke past southern landscapes and family life as they paint trenchant portraits of adolescent girls and women. Those traits, along with Haardts perpetual conflict with her own southernness, lead Henley to place Haardt as a precursor to such writers as Carson McCullers, Flannery OConnor, Eudora Welty, and, more recently, Alice Walker and Lee Smith.ReviewSara Haardts short works, both fiction and nonfiction, capture her world, with its people, places, and concerns ranging from family to gender to race. Her insightful and honest writing allows readers to experience that past and to recognize, sadly, that some struggles persist today.Nancy Grisham Anderson, Auburn University at MontgomeryFrom the Back CoverSara Haardt's character sketches, short stories, and essays appeared regularly in leading literary and popular magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. Southern Souvenirs brings together both prizewinning and previously unpublished work, reintroduces Haardt to scholar and general reader alike, and restores her place in the pantheon of southern letters.Although Haardt struggled with poor health throughout her life, she published widely in such magazines and journals as The Reviewer, Mencken's The Smart Set, Atlantic Monthly, Bookman, and Harper's Bazaar before her untimely death from tuberculosis in 1935. Her story 'Absolutely Perfect' was among the O. Henry Prize stories for 1933; 'Little White Girl' was included in Best Short Stories of 1935. Haardt's works richly evoke the landscapes and family life of the early 20thcentury South and paint trenchant portraits of its girls and women. These achievements, along with Haardt's perpetual conflict with her own southernness, lead Henley to place Haardt as a precursor to such writers as Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and, more recently, Alice Walker and Lee Smith.About the AuthorAnn Henley teaches in the Department of English at North Carolina State University.