Early Literary Career
Bonner's first months in Boston were lonely and frugal. Her privileged background and pride clashed painfully with her new circumstances, and at first she lived on crackers and ginger snaps and was forced to "trot up and down with coal and things", tasks previously reserved for servants. Capen secured for her a place at a Boston school for young women, and she worked hard to make the most of the prospects offered her, but at twenty-four she was some years older than most of the young ladies that attended and found herself subsequently on the outside of their society. Despite this culture shock Bonner persisted in the face of literary rejection, family pressure and poor living conditions. She thrived on the literary criticisms offered by editors that rejected her early work and was brash enough to prevail upon the renowned poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It is a credit to Bonner's social grace and personality that within one hour's audience with Longfellow, she secured a lifelong patronage; he provided both financial support and professional encouragement.
The work provided her by Longfellow, such as the role she played as his editorial assistant on Poems of Places, and the contact his society afforded her with editors and publishers gave Bonner many opportunities to advance herself. In 1876 Bonner toured England and Europe for ten months with the well-known novelist Louise Chandler Moulton and wrote "more than a dozen travel articles that were published simultaneously in the Boston Times and the Memphis, Tennessee, Avalanche." Success at writing articles for magazines gained her a contract to write what was to be her only novel, Like unto Like (1878). Bonner's literary career was off the ground at last.
Read more about this topic: Katherine Sherwood Bonner Mc Dowell
Famous quotes containing the words early, literary and/or career:
“We have been told over and over about the importance of bonding to our children. Rarely do we hear about the skill of letting go, or, as one parent said, “that we raise our children to leave us.” Early childhood, as our kids gain skills and eagerly want some distance from us, is a time to build a kind of adult-child balance which permits both of us room.”
—Joan Sheingold Ditzion (20th century)
“Carlyle, to adopt his own classification, is himself the hero as literary man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A black boxer’s career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)