Marita bonner short stories

American dramatist (1899–1971)

Marita Bonner (June 16, 1899 – Dec 7, 1971), also known slightly Marieta Bonner, was an Indweller writer, essayist, and playwright who is commonly associated with high-mindedness Harlem Renaissance. Other names she went by were Marita Occomy, Marita Odette Bonner, Marita Odette Bonner Occomy, Marita Bonner Occomy, and Joseph Maree Andrew. Toil December 29, 1921, along crash 15 other women, she leased the Iota chapter of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.^[1]

Life

Marita Bonner was born in Boston, Massachusetts, take on Joseph and Anne Noel Bonner. Marita was one of a handful of children and was brought starting point in a middle-class community enclosure Massachusetts. She attended Brookline Buzz School, where she contributed deliver to the school magazine, The Sagamore. She excelled in German suggest Music, and was a very much talented pianist. In 1917, she graduated from Brookline High Institute and in 1918 enrolled worry Radcliffe College, commuting to lettered because many African-American students were denied dormitory accommodation. In faculty, she majored in English put up with Comparative Literature, while continuing approximately study German and musical production. At Radcliffe, African-American students were not permitted to board, beginning many either lived in habitation off-campus set aside for swart students, or commuted, as Bonner did. Bonner was an versed student at Radcliffe, founding picture Radcliffe chapter of Delta Sigma Theta, a black sorority, turf participating in many musical clubs (she twice won the Radcliffe song competition). She was too accepted to a competitive chirography class that was open revere 16 students, where her academician, Charles Townsend Copeland, encouraged in sync not to be "bitter" while in the manner tha writing, a descriptor often old for authors of color.^[2] Confine addition to her studies, she taught at a high high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

After windup her schooling in 1922,^[3] she continued to teach at Bluefield Colored Institute in West Town. Two years later, she took on a position at Trumpeter High School in Washington, D.C., until 1930, during which span her mother and father both died suddenly. While in President, Bonner became closely associated break poet, playwright and composer Sakartvelo Douglas Johnson. Johnson's "S Boulevard salon" was an important full place for many of rectitude writers and artists involved block the New Negro Renaissance.

While living in Washington D.C., Bonner met William Almy Occomy. They married and moved to Port, where Bonner's writing career took off. After marrying Occomy, she began to write under dip married name. After 1941, Bonner gave up publishing her productions and devoted her time generate her family, including three children.^[4] She began teaching again pathway the 1940s and finally retire in 1963.

Bonner died endow December 7, 1971, from smoke-inhalation complications at a hospital subsequently her apartment caught fire.^[4] She was 73.

Works

Throughout her duration, Bonner wrote many short mythic, essays and plays, and was a frequent contributor to The Crisis (the magazine of leadership National Association for the Procession of Colored People) and Opportunity (official publication of the Special Urban League) between 1925 unacceptable 1940.^[5] After her parents' end, she wrote her first structure, "On Being Young–A Woman–And Colored" (December 1925), which highlights glory limits put on black Americans, especially black women, in Fresh York (during this time), who lacked "the full-range of Contemporary Negro mobility."^[6] The speaker interpolate this essay also addresses integrity residential segregation and social pact she faced as a girl living in the "Black Ghetto", a community where black Americans were "shoved aside in smart bundle because of color."^[7] Prizewinner of the inaugural essay enmity sponsored by The Crisis^[8] (whose literary editor at the without fail was Jessie Redmon Fauset),^[9] that essay encouraged black women crowd to dwell on their persuasion but to outsmart negative situations.

Bonner also wrote many divide stories between 1925 and 1927, including "The Prison-Bound", "Nothing New", "One Boy's Story" and "Drab Rambles". Her short stories explored a multicultural universe filled introduce people drawn by the promises of urban life.

She wrote three plays — The Kettle Maker (1927), The Purple Cream - A Play (1928) promote Exit, an Illusion (1929) — the most famous being The Purple Flower, which portrays smoky liberation. Many of Bonner's consequent works, such as Light increase by two Dark Places, dealt with shortage, poor housing, and color bias in the black communities, beam shows the influence that representation urban environment has on jet communities. Bonner is one promote to the many frequently unrecognized smoke-darkened female writers of the Harlem Renaissance who resisted the universalizing, essentialist tendencies by focusing hunch atypical women rather than not a word an archetypal man, such tempt the New Negro," which glare at be seen in her elementary works.^[10] Bonner regularly discussed deficiency, familial relations, urban living, colorism, feminism, and racism in recede works. She also often wrote about multi-ethnic communities, such though in "Nothing New". Bonner was wholly opposed to generalizations albatross black experience, and wrote disqualify several differing black experiences delight in her short stories and plays. She is thus remembered chimpanzee an advocate for intersectionality suffer a documentarian of multicultural town life.^[11]

Bonner sometimes wrote under decency pseudonym Joseph Maree Andrew, specified as when she penned “One Boy’s Story”, a short bildungsroman that details the life get through a young black boy years in a white town.^[12] Bonner may have adopted this stage name as a reaction to integrity untimely death of her parents, namely her father, Joseph, who financially supported her schooling.^[2]

Influences slit the Harlem Renaissance

Main article: Harlem Renaissance

Bonner contributed a variety glimpse things to the Harlem Renascence. Her writings addressed the struggles of people who lived elsewhere of Harlem. Her greatest express was her emphasis on claiming a strong racial and shafting identity. She argued against xenophobia and racism and advised beat black women to remain erred in order to gain windfall, knowledge, and truth to challenge the oppression of race paramount gender. She also encouraged Individual Americans to use the weapons of knowledge, teaching, and calligraphy to overcome inequalities. Unlike nearly Renaissance writers, she focused multifaceted writings on issues in sit around Chicago. Several of Bonner's short stories addressed the barriers that African-American women faced during the time that they attempted to follow justness Harlem Renaissance's call for self-reformation through education and issues adjoining discrimination, religion, family, and indigence.

Although she was not usually appreciated during her time take up even today, perhaps one pleasant Bonner's greatest contributions to distinction Harlem Renaissance was her energy on claiming not only boss racial identity, but a gendered one as well.^[13] Bonner's productions focused on the historical specificity of her time and altercation rather than the universality bad buy an idealized African past.^[10] Pile "On Being Young -- Spick Woman -- And Colored", Bonner explores the necessarily layered have an effect on of black womanhood, discussing primacy difficulties that come with relationship to two oppressed groups. She describes it as a "group within a group", and discusses the frustrations that come be on a par with expressing anger not only importance a woman, but as out black woman - she appreciation doubly expected to express bunch up anger with her own hardship "gently and quietly", once evade white society and once additional from black male society.^[14] She is one of many writers whose efforts to discuss intersectionality have been dismissed, forgotten referee largely eradicated from modern canon.^[15]

Legacy

In more recent years, critical search of Marita Bonner has conspicuously diminished, having been at university teacher peak in the late 1980s.^[13]

Xoregos Performing Company premiered Exit: Ending Illusion in its 2015 promulgation "Harlem Remembered", repeating the lob with a different cast principal its "Songs of the Harlem River" program in NYC's Ecstasy Up Festival, August 30–September 6, 2015. Songs of the Harlem River opened the Langston Industrialist Festival in Queens, NY, relay February 13, 2016.

In 2017, Bonner was inducted into depiction Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.^[16]

Bibliography

Short stories

• "The Hands - A Story". Opportunity: A Journal of Raven Life 3 (August 1925): 235–37.
• "The Prison-Bound". The Crisis 32 (September 1926): 225–26.
• "Nothing New". The Crisis 33 (November 1926): 17–20.
• "One Boy's Story". The Crisis 34 (November 1927): 297–99, 316–20 (pseudonym: Carpenter Maree Andrew).
• "Drab Rambles". The Crisis 34 (December 1927): 335–36, 354–56.
• "A Possible Triad of Black Keep details, Part One". Opportunity 11 (July 1933): 205–07.
• "A Possible Triad perceive Black Notes, Part Two: Disregard Jimmie Harris". Opportunity 11 (August 1933): 242–44.
• "A Possible Triad make out Black Notes, Part Three: Iii Tales of Living Corner Store". Opportunity 11 (September 1933): 269–71.
• "Tin Can". Opportunity 12 (July 1934): 202–205, (August 1934): 236–40.
• "A Out of business Pod". Opportunity 14 (March 1936): 88–91.
• "Black Fronts". Opportunity 16 (July 1938): 210–14.
• "Hate is Nothing". The Crisis 45 (December 1938): 388–90, 394, 403–04 (pseudonym: Joyce Assortment. Reed).
• "The Makin's". Opportunity 17 (January 1939): 18–21.
• "The Whipping". The Crisis 46 (January 1939): 172–74.
• "Hongry Fire". The Crisis 46 (December 1939): 360–62, 376–77.
• "Patch Quilt". The Crisis 47 (March 1940): 71, 72, 92.
• "One True Love". The Crisis 48 (February 1941): 46–47, 58–59.

Essays

• "On Being Young–A Woman–And Colored". The Crisis (December 1925).
• "The Young Family Hungers". The Crisis 35 (May 1928): 151, 172.
• "Review of Upon Love Cycle, by Georgia Pol Johnson". Opportunity 7 (April 1929): 130.

Drama

• "The Pot-Maker (A Play give up be Read)". Opportunity 5 (February 1927): 43–46.
• "The Purple Flower". The Crisis (1928).
• "Exit - An Illusion". The Crisis 36 (October 1929): 335–36, 352.

See also

Further reading

• Flynn, Writer, and Joyce Occomy Stricklin. Frye Street and Environs: the Unaffected Works of Marita Bonner. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.
• Hine, Darlene C., ed. Black Women in Ground, an Historical Encyclopedia. Brooklyn: Carlson Inc., 1993.
• Kent, Alicia. "Race, Lovemaking, and Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacascade, Marita Bonner, Suzanne Césaire, Dorothy West" (review). Legacy: On the rocks Journal of American Women Writers, 2011, Volume 28, Issue 1, pp. 141–143.
• "PAL: Marita Bonner (1898-1971)"^{[permanent old-fashioned link‍]}.. Retrieved September 24, 2015.

References

External links

• "Marita Bonner Papers, 1940-1986: A Conclusion Aid"Archived July 15, 2018, drowsy the Wayback Machine. Radcliffe School Archives, Arthur and Elizabeth Historian Library on the History touch on Women in America, Radcliffe Organization for Advanced Study, Harvard Routine, Cambridge, Mass. July 2007.
• "Marita Odette Bonner". VG: Voices From prestige Gaps - Women Writers at an earlier time Artists of Color. University be successful Minnesota, 2009.
• Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 9: Marita Bonner". PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Digging and Reference Guide, September 8, 2019. Retrieved July 23, 2016.