Literary Works
Most notable among Bonner's publications were her local color stories in which she is said to have an "adept and skillful handling of Negro dialect", basing many of her stories around the "gran'mammy" figure she knew in her youth, Bonner's stories of Southern life were not tinged with bitterness over the victory of the North in the Civil War, rather she viewed the war as the crisis of the nation as a whole. Going so far as to disparage critics of reconstruction such as Wendell Phillips, she wrote that "The Cassandras have never saved a country yet… the critic is always and always has been overestimated as an intellectual force in his life time… The everlasting 'no' gets monotonous in the long term." Bonner favored creators over critics. Other works of note include her Dialect Tales and Suwanee River Tales. For a more thorough discussion of her works and literary merits see McAlexander's The Prodigal Daughter: A Biography of Sherwood Bonner.
Read more about this topic: Katherine Sherwood Bonner Mc Dowell
Famous quotes containing the words literary and/or works:
“The want of an international Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the way of remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“...A shadow now occasionally crossed my simple, sanguine, and life enjoying mind, a notion that I was never really going to accomplish those powerful literary works which would blow a noble trumpet to social generosity and noblesse oblige before the world. What? should I find myself always planning and never achieving ... a richly complicated and yet firmly unified novel?”
—Sarah N. Cleghorn (1876–1959)