Literary Significance and Criticism
Hurst was a Jewish white woman and supporter of feminist causes. She also supported African Americans in their struggle for greater equality. She was deeply involved in the Harlem Renaissance, especially with Zora Neale Hurston. Hurst helped sponsor Hurston in her first year at Barnard and employed Hurston briefly as an executive secretary. The two traveled together on road trips that may have contributed to Hurst's understanding of racial discrimination. Both Hurston and Langston Hughes claimed to like Imitation of Life, though both reversed their opinion after Sterling Allen Brown lambasted both the book and the first film in a review entitled "Imitation of Life: Once a Pancake", a reference to a line in the first film. The novel Imitation of Life continues to be highly controversial, as some read it as heavy-handed stereotyping, while others see it as a more subtle and subversive satire of and commentary on race, sex, and class in early 20th century America. Both text and films have remained deeply embedded in American consciousness, for better or worse, as evidenced by Toni Morrison's use of a character named "Pecola" in her 1970 novel The Bluest Eye.
Read more about this topic: Imitation Of Life (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or criticism:
“England has the most sordid literary scene I’ve ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy’s writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They’re all scratching each other’s backs.”
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“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
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