If you work in book publishing, there is a good chance you are a white, able-bodied, straight woman. This according to a pioneering survey commissioned by Lee & Low Books, a minority-owned publisher of children’s books and Foreword’s 2014 Publisher of the Year.
The Diversity Baseline Survey (DBS), released Tuesday, seeks to establish a ground floor of “hard numbers” that measures the diversity of publishing staff. According to a description in its methodology, the survey was made available to 1,524 reviewer employees and 11,713 publishing employees across most major publishers and several independent presses — although it appears that HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster did not participate in the study. They survey’s response rate was 25.8%.
The impetus for the survey, according to its introduction, was the publisher’s belief that it could “illuminate a problem that can otherwise be dismissed or swept under the rug” and “measure whether or not initiatives to increase diversity among publishing staff were actually working.”
It seems that such initiatives are not working. The overall industry numbers point to staff makeup that is 79% white, 78% cis woman, 88% straight, and 92% not differently abled. A further breakdown shows an industry that is only 4% black, 7% Asian/Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and 6% Hispanic, Latino, or Mexican. And these dismal numbers are consistent across industry categories, with only a minor improvement, exclusively for Asian employees, in marketing.
One bright spot in the survey results is the publishing industry’s gender composition, which leans heavily away from men/cis men and toward women/cis women (again, the overall number is 78%). Still, all other categories (trans man, trans woman, intersex, and gender nonconforming) are at or less than 1%. And the numbers, though still strong, dip in the executive category, which is 40% male.
A missing category from the survey, one that could be implemented (however imperfectly) in the coming years, is socioeconomic and/or educational background. Without survey results, it is difficult to determine the number of publishing professionals who have never completed college, for example. The importance of this category was underscored recently by a new policy from Penguin Random House UK, one that removes the requirement that employees earn a college degree. No such policy has been implemented by Penguin Random House in the US, but Claire von Schilling, its Director of Corporate Communications, tells Flavorwire that although the company does have some job listings that require college degrees, it has “long been routinely hiring staff throughout our company who have not received college degrees, enabling us to employ many excellent professionals who have never completed certified higher-education schooling.”
The conclusion to the survey nods to similar problems in other media, and certainly the film industry’s reluctance to commit to producing or honoring black and non-white artists and staff comes immediately to mind. “Now that the Diversity Baseline Survey is completed,” the report concludes, “the real work toward changing the status quo begins”:
It is not going to be easy. Knowing where we stand and establishing a baseline was the first step. Knowing the baseline numbers gives us a way to measure progress going forward, but only our actions can change things for the better.
Although the relation between publishing’s overwhelming whiteness and the books it produces is not directly explored by the Diverse Baseline Survey, it’s probably a safe bet to assume that more books by non-white domestic and international writers would find their way to shelves if the industry decided to enact substantial change. The bare fact that we’re now woefully under-publishing black writers, to focus on a single category, is put into relief during an historical short-term period that has seen Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and John Keene’s Counternarratives — to list just three books that sit at the highest point of their respective forms. What aren’t we reading?
Clean
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Given the fact that writing is a relatively recent invention, scientists are keen to understand how we read and recognize words as our brains cannot have evolved a dedicated mechanism for reading. Clues about these abilities started to be unraveled a few years back when scientists discovered a part of the brain that was activated upon reading, but interestingly, its response seemed to be strictly visual. This led scientists to believe that we identify words from images before associating them with sounds and meanings.
Although this idea was contested, scientists have now gathered evidence that lends support to this hypothesis. According to a new study, our brain sees words we know like a picture, recognizing whole words, rather than strings of letters that require processing. By tuning neurons to respond to complete words that have been seen before, our brain allows us to read quickly.
“We are not recognizing words by quickly spelling them out or identifying parts of words, as some researchers have suggested,”
senior author Maximilian Reisenhuber explains in a statement. “Instead, neurons in a small brain area remember how the whole word looks—using what could be called a visual dictionary.”
The functional brain region Reisenhuber is referring to is called the visual word form area (VWFA). This is located in the left side of the visual cortex, roughly behind the left ear and opposite a similar region on the right side known as the fusiform face area, which is responsible for facial recognition.
“One area is selective for a whole face, allowing us to quickly recognize people,” Reisenhuber adds, “and the other is selective for a whole word, which helps us read quickly.”
To come to this conclusion, a team of scientists from Georgetown University Medical Center gathered a small group of adult participants and trained them to recognize new nonsense words, or pseudowords. In order to investigate brain activity and visualize how neurons were responding to the words, the researchers performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on the volunteers both before and after the learning task.
As described in the Journal of Neuroscience, they found that neurons within the VWFA respond differently to real words, like chair, than to pseudowords, such as hrica. However, they also found that activity within this region changed after learning to recognize the pseudowords. Prior to training, the pseudowords elicited broadly tuned responses, but after they learned the words, the responses became more specific and highly tuned, as if the participants were looking at real words.
“This study is the first of its kind to show how neurons change their tuning with learning words, demonstrating the brain’s plasticity,” lead author Laurie Glezer said in a news release.
Alongside furthering our knowledge of how the brain processes words, this research has implications for designing strategies to help those with reading difficulties. For example, teaching people to learn whole words as visual objects, rather than by phonetically spelling them out, could be worth investigating.
We are so honored to be Writers in Residence at the Library Hotel. As always, all opinions are our own.
When we write the accounts of our escapades around the globe, we usually don’t bother mentioning where we stay.
It’s not that we don’t appreciate hotels, it’s just that,
let’s face it, most are simply a place to lay our heads after romping
around all day. What can we say? “The towels were nice and the TV
worked.” Not exactly a captivating story.
But sometimes the accommodations are the story, and such is the case with the Library Hotel in New York City.
In a city with hundreds, if not thousands, of hotels it is
hard to stand out, yet the Library Hotel has done just that. So when we
were invited to become Writers in Residence, we jumped at the chance.
The idea is to add to the incredible literary ambience of the
hotel by having a few writers hanging around, and let us say, it’s a
writer’s -- or a reader’s -- paradise.
<-- 25 feet wide, 100 feet long, and 14 stories high, the hotel is one of NYC's first sliver buildings
A big part of the atmosphere of the hotel stems from its proximity to the New York Public Library’s main branch. Around the same time as that massive home to over one million
volumes was opened in 1911, a group of businessmen were building one
of the city’s first sliver buildings a block away.
<-- Looking down 41st Street toward the New York Public Library from the rooftop garden of the Library Hotel
After nearly a century of serving as offices, the beautiful little slice of architecture became the Library Hotel. The renovations left the exterior wonderfully intact, while
adding rooms and over a million dollars of mahogany bookshelves in the
interior.
Books
are everywhere, from the moment we checked in at the card
catalogue-decorated front desk in the shelf-lined lobby, to the
hundreds of titles in each room that correspond to its number in the
Dewey Decimal System.
For example, our room, 905, is based on 900.005 in the famous
library-organizing system, which is the travel and geography category.
Absolutely a perfect fit for us, and we fell asleep blissfully reading
of far-off places every night.
As we investigated the motifs of the other rooms, we realized
that we could have been just as happy in 800.005, filled with fairy
tales, or the mysteries right next door, or the Love Suite at 1100.006.
But it would be tough to beat 500.006, the Astronomy Suite where Neil Armstrong took one giant sleep for mankind.
The rooms aren’t the only place designed to inspire reading
and writing, the second floor Reading Room serves as a quiet getaway,
or the place to be for breakfast and each evening's wine and cheese reception.
For even more inspiration, the rooftop Writer's Den and Poetry Garden did the trick.
Come cocktail hour, the garden transforms into the hotel’s lounge, Bookmarks.
We couldn’t think of a better place to thank all of the folks at Skyhorse Publishing who worked so hard getting our book, Going Gypsy: One Couple's Adventure from Empty Nest to No Nest at All, ready for publication, so we invited them all over for an after-work, literary-inspired drink.
We all sipped our “Ernest Hemingway”s and “Tequila
Mockingbird”s while enjoying each other’s company and fantastic views
of Manhattan.
<-- Get it? It's a bookmark!
See how we slipped that plug in there, downright clever, huh? Sorry,
couldn’t pass up the chance for some shameless self-promotion.
Especially since we were so excited to see everyone that we forgot to
take pictures to commemorate the occasion (still kicking ourselves!).
We also couldn’t pass up visiting New York’s best known literary
landmark, the public library, so we followed the ninety-six bronze
sidewalk insets along 41st Street that form Library Way.
The walk’s bronze plaques feature quotes from classic literature and
authors, paired with innovative artwork by Gregg LeFevre.
We read our way right to the steps between Patience and
Fortitude, the two lions that guard the entrance to the massive
archives. Fortitude is pictured above, and the easiest way to tell them
apart is that Fortitude is closest to 42nd Street. --> 42=fortitude!
As
we climbed the stairs things felt very familiar, must have been
because the grand old building has been the star of countless movies,
from Breakfast at Tiffany's, to Spider-Man, to the haunted book stacks
in Ghostbusters.
Unfortunately, we did not get a chance to see those famous
stacks. The one-hundred-and-twenty-five miles of shelves are off limits
to the public. Can’t have the books getting misplaced or out of order,
because the proverbial needle in the haystack would seem simple compared to finding a lost volume.
The
the attempts at snapping the perfect photo of the ceiling in the McGraw
Rotunda are many and varied. We gave up and simply laid down on the
floor for ours!
The ceiling depicts Prometheus
giving man the gift of fire, symbolizing knowledge. The murals in the
rotunda are collectively titled The Story of the Recorded Word.
So we contented ourselves with simply taking in the grandeur
of one of America’s largest marble buildings and viewing some of the
artifacts on display. Of course the library has an outstanding
collection of rare books, but it also serves as a museum of sorts, with
hundreds of heirlooms donated throughout the years.
Back
in our geography-and-travel-inspired hideaway in the Library Hotel,
just thinking about all of those books was a bit mind boggling.
But we contentedly drifted off counting books instead of sheep.
“In the long run it is the complex interplay of
different capacities, feminine and masculine, that protects the humanity
of human beings.”
Margaret Mead
is celebrated as the world’s best-known and most influential cultural
anthropologist, having not only popularized anthropology itself but also
laid the foundation for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. She brought
the essential tools of anthropology — the art of looking,
coupled with a great capacity for listening, for asking and answering
questions — to her prolific university lectures, public talks, and
presentations at various organizations that claimed her time and
thought. In the sixteen-year period between 1963 and January of 1979, Redbook Magazine
published Mead’s answers to the best questions she had received from
audience members over her extensive career — questions about love, sex,
religion, politics, social dynamics, gender equality, personal choices,
and the human condition.
After Mead’s death in late 1978, her partner for the last twenty-two years, the anthropologist and Redbook editor Rhoda Metraux, collected the best of these questions and answers in Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views (public library).
As Metraux writes in the foreword, “Margaret Mead’s most winning gift
was surely her capacity for immediate, zealous response… She took for
granted that a sophisticated question required a sophisticated answer,
but she never rebuffed the person who had to struggle to find words. One
thing exasperated her: without hesitation she pricked the balloon of
the pompous, pretentious questioner.”
With her characteristic blend of scientific rigor, humanistic wisdom,
and strong personal conviction, Mead addresses a number of issues all
the timelier today, but none with more prescience than the question of
the shifting social norms and responsibilities for women and men.
In 1963, she offers a wonderfully dimensional answer to a question
about why “the most outstanding creative people in all fields have been
predominantly men,” folding into her rationale the still-radical assertion that women make naturally better scientists:
There are three possible positions one can take about
male and female creativity. The first is that males are inherently more
creative in all fields. The second is that if it were not for the
greater appeal of creating and cherishing young human beings, females
would be as creative as males. If this were the case, then if men were
permitted the enjoyment women have always had in rearing young children,
male creativity might be reduced also… The third possible position is
that certain forms of creativity are more congenial to one sex than to
the other and that the great creative acts will therefore come from only
one sex in a given field.
There is some reason to believe that males may always excel — by just
the small degree that makes the difference between good capacity and
great talent — in such fields as music and mathematics, where creativity
involves imposing form rather than finding it. There is also reason to
believe that women have a slightly greater potential in those fields in
which it is necessary to listen and learn, to find forms in nature or in
their own hearts rather than to make entirely new ones; these fields
could include certain areas of literature, and some forms of science
that depend on observation and recognition of pattern, such as the study
of living creatures or children or societies.
But Mead argues that the capacity for achievement is, above all, a
matter of context, which is invariably a social construct — something
that only intensifies our responsibility in creating a cultural context
that allows all creative abilities to shine:
When women work in a creative field, even one that is
particularly congenial to them, they must generally work with forms that
were created by men, or else struggle against special odds to develop
new forms. Until we have an educational system that permits enough women
to work within any field — music, mathematics, painting, literature,
biology and so on — so that forms which are equally congenial to both
sexes are developed, we shall not have a fair test of this third
possibility.
We do not know that what one sex has developed, members of the other
sex can learn — from cookery to calculus. In those countries of the
Eastern bloc in which women are expected to play an equal part with men
in the sciences, great numbers of women have shown a previously
unsuspected ability. We run a great risk of squandering half of our
human gifts by arbitrarily denying any field to either sex or by
penalizing women who try to use their gifts creatively.
In another question from December of the same year, Mead returns to
the cultural differences across the Iron Curtain. A few months earlier,
in June of 1963, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova had become the
world’s first woman in space. It would be twenty years until the second,
American astronaut Sally Ride,
launched into the cosmos. Considering the cultural context Russian vs.
American women have for achievement in space exploration, Mead writes:
On the question of woman cosmonauts, the Russians have
been able to be realistic and practical. If we are going to do anything
important with space, especially with space colonization, then we need
to know at once how well women can withstand the new conditions. The
American tendency to protect men’s sense of masculinity by keeping women
out of things results — as does our handling of race — simply in an
American loss.
Illustration from 'Blast-Off,' a visionary 1973 children's
book celebrating gender equality and ethnic diversity in space
exploration. Click image for more.
In November of 1965, Mead answers a question about women’s evolving
identity outside “their purely feminine role” and how they are to seek
fulfillment beyond the qualities of beauty and charm traditionally
rewarded as the height of female accomplishment:
It is probable that far more women can achieve lasting
contentment … where a woman can be honored as a person because she has
borne and cared for children, has taught in a school or cared for the
sick, has managed a business, has practiced a profession, has written
poems.
[…]
When marriage was for life and when death was likely to come early, a
woman’s career as wife and mother was often completely circumscribed by
her husband’s career as provider and achiever.
Today, however, this is no longer true. We educate girls so that they
are capable of greater intellectual accomplishment than our form of
marriage and housekeeping permits them to use. Marriages are not always
for life. And child rearing takes up only part of a woman’s adult life.
These three major changes have refocused our attention on the question
of woman’s identity and the relationship between the feminine arts and
feminine accomplishments.
But as these changes were afoot in the 1960s — the cusp of monumental
cultural change, propelled by such landmark events as the 1963
publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique
and the introduction of the oral contraceptive pill in the early 1960s —
many bemoaned the “defeminization” of society. Mead handles this term
with enormous semantic skepticism and addresses it in answering a
question from March of 1966:
Defeminization [may] refer to role. Where men have been
the traditional breadwinners, initially it seems defeminizing when women
go out to earn their living. Where all secretaries were men, as at one
time they were in the English-speaking world, it was defeminizing for a
woman to take a position as a secretary. Most roles of this kind are a
matter of convention in a particular society at a given time. Their
specific definitions as “masculine” or “feminine” often have very little
to do with the capacities of men and women.
There is a sense, however, in which certain changes in women’s roles
may be regarded as dehumanizing. Traditionally women have had to
consider their children’s long-time protection and well-being to be
their central goal. Where a society, by its moral conventions and
standards of living or by various coercive rules and regulations,*
forces women to neglect any of the necessary forms of prenatal and
maternal behavior, there may be a dehumanizing effect on the members of
that society — both men and women.
Before WWII, pink was a color associated with masculinity,
considered a watered-down red symbolizing the power generally associated
with that color. Photographs from Korean visual artist JeongMee Yoon's
'Pink and Blue Projects.' Click image for details.
Mead’s words ring with particular poignancy half a century later, in the Lean In era and its crusade against “bossy”,
as she considers how women can counter these claims of
“defeminization,” rooted in old values and male ideals, by claiming a
new context of evaluation:
Whenever women become part of an organization or an
activity that is defined as aggressively and ruthlessly competitive,
they must develop a style of behavior different from that of men in the
same occupation if they are not to become “defeminized.” … In the
conference room, women do better to insist on high standards of
courtesy, comfort and consideration in a mixed group of which they are
an integral part. In the long run it is the complex interplay of
different capacities, feminine and masculine, that protects the humanity
of human beings.
Mead’s prescience doesn’t end there — half a century before Shonda Rhimes addressed the issue in her superb commencement address,
Mead considers the impossible standards for women as they try to
reconcile inhabiting their capacities fully with fulfilling traditional
roles. In June of 1967, upon being asked whether modern women are
becoming “increasingly narcissistic,” Mead offers a brilliant answer at
once thoughtful and feisty:
All of this brings up an inevitable question: In June of 1967, nearly fifty years before our present age of “Be a man. Take paternity leave,” Mead explores the changing role of men in parenting:
We are evolving a new style of fatherhood, in which young
fathers share very fully with mothers in the care of babies and little
children… One question one can ask is what effect this is likely to have
on the next generation and the life of the wider community.
Illustration by Øyvind Torseter from 'My Father's Arms Are a Boat' by Stein Erik Lunde. Click image for details.
Noting that the invention of bottle feeding and instant baby food has
enabled fathers to do for their children everything mothers can
physically do, she peers into the broader cultural liberation that equal
parenting makes possible, returning to the question of male and female
creative achievement:
Perhaps we are in the process of developing a style of
parenthood that has never before been attempted by a civilized people, a
style that will set children of both sexes free of some of the
constraints that have forced on them narrow occupational and personality
choices because of narrow sex identification. On the other hand, we may
be destroying the set of motives that have made men the great achievers
and innovators of civilization. At the same time we may not be
developing enough ambitious and highly motivated women to take the place
of the men whose chief delight is their children. It is still an open
question how our children, as adults, will respond to the challenges of
the wider society to become active in its concerns and interests.
In answering two questions in August of 1975, Mead considers the
necessary shifts in gender dynamics that would help both men and women
ease into such cultural change rather than tensing against it. Once
again, her words resound with extraordinary prescience and emanate the
bittersweet reminder that however far we may have come in resolving
these issues, they still gape raw and vulnerable for both sexes. Mead
writes:
It will take genuine commitment, not to labels such as
chauvinist or liberationist, but to the value of human relationships to
work out new ways for men and women to live together.
[…]
It isn’t really a question of men’s “getting over” [the liberation of women], but of men’s and women’s finding a new balance in their relationships.
Illustration from the parodic 1970 children's book 'I’m Glad
I’m a Boy!: I’m Glad I’m a Girl!' by New Yorker cartoonist Whitney
Darrow, Jr. Click image for details.
Mead examines the broader social dynamics underpinning the shift,
which apply equally to other, present-day areas of resistance to social
change, from immigration to marriage equality:
Whenever there are changes in the way tasks and roles,
obligations and privileges, opportunities and responsibilities are
apportioned between the sexes, among people of different ages or among
people of different national backgrounds or races, some group is bound
to feel threatened. But the curious thing is that those who are
proposing — insisting on — change tend to believe that those who feel
threatened must be hostile, and often they themselves become hostile in
response to what they believe they perceive.
I emphasize these feelings of threat and counterthreat because I
think that today, in the face of the Women’s Liberation Movement, we are
making far too much of the point of necessary anger on the part of
women and inevitable hostility on the part of men.
Roles are changing for both women and men. Women are being pressured
on every side to insist on living in a different way and to believe that
their past status was brought about by male oppression. At the same
time men who thought that they were being good husbands and fathers and
were working hard to care for and protect the mothers of their children
are being accused of being oppressors — and angry oppressors at that.
The whole process of change is taking place in an atmosphere of the
greatest bad temper and a tremendous amount of secondary hostility is
being generated that in itself poses a threat to a good outcome.
[…]
We should begin to realize that both men and women need liberation
from a life-style that is stultifying and destructive to both sexes.
But despite the challenges of her time — challenges still very much
present today — Mead saw the future of gender dynamics with unflinching
optimism:
I believe we are already beginning to create new manly
and womanly roles that will permit a great deal more individual choice
as well as better health for men and a fuller, more gratifying sense of
themselves for women.
Above all, she championed a vision for unmooring human potentiality
from imprisoning stereotypes about gendered creative ability — something
Susan Sontag memorably echoed a decade later — and creating the best possible conditions for individual gifts, male and female, to blossom:
There is encouraging evidence [that society] is moving —
gradually, at least — toward recognition of individual aptitudes and
inclinations, away from the automatic assignment of tasks based on
stereotyped expectations of the capacities of either sex.
* Mead is most likely
referring to anti-abortion laws, which she consistently condemned for
forcing girls and women into motherhood who may be unfit, unwilling, or
socioeconomically unequipped to be mothers. In answering a question on
the subject in 1963, she asserted: “I believe that our abortion laws
should be changed… I believe that we should not prescribe the conditions
under which abortion is permissible… Wherever abortion is illegal,
unnumbered girls and women, married and unmarried, run frightful risks…”
“The creative instinct is … an enormous extra
vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual… — an
energy which no single life can consume.”
On December 10, 1938, novelist, essayist, and civil rights activist Pearl S. Buck
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her rich and truly epic
descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical
masterpieces.” Buck was born in China to American missionary parents and
spent the first four decades of her life living there — an experience
she wove into her beloved book The Good Earth,
which had won the Pulitzer Prize six years earlier. Although three
other women had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature prior to
Buck, she was and remains the youngest female laureate — at 46, she was
nineteen years younger than the average laureate in the category and the
third-youngest to that point, after Rudyard Kipling and, only narrowly,
Harry Sinclair Lewis. The only younger laureate since Buck has been Albert Camus.
Two days after the announcement, on December 12, Buck took the stage
at the Swedish Academy to deliver a superb acceptance address,
eventually included Nobel Writers on Writing (public library | IndieBound).
Although much of the speech is true to its title — “The Chinese Novel” —
at its heart lies a broader, exquisitely timeless contemplation of the
purpose of art and the vitalizing nature of creativity.
Buck considers the shimmering aliveness of which creative work is born:
The instinct which creates the arts is not the
same as that which produces art. The creative instinct is, in its final
analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a
super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual, a vitality great
beyond all the needs of his own living — an energy which no single life
can consume. This energy consumes itself then in creating more life, in
the form of music, painting, writing, or whatever is its most natural
medium of expression. Nor can the individual keep himself from this
process, because only by its full function is he relieved of the burden
of this extra and peculiar energy — an energy at once physical and
mental, so that all his senses are more alert and more profound than
another man’s, and all his brain more sensitive and quickened to that
which his senses reveal to him in such abundance that actuality
overflows into imagination. It is a process proceeding from within. It
is the heightened activity of every cell of his being, which sweeps not
only himself, but all human life about him, or in him, in his dreams,
into the circle of its activity.
Noting that art is deduced from this activity, Buck nonetheless
cautions against preoccupation with forms and techniques at the expense
of clarity of creative vision:
The process which creates is not the process which
deduces the shapes of art. The defining of art, therefore, is a
secondary and not a primary process. And when one born for the primary
process of creation, as the novelist is, concerns himself with the
secondary process, his activity becomes meaningless. When he begins to
make shapes and styles and techniques and new schools, then he is like a
ship stranded upon a reef whose propeller, whirl wildly as it will,
cannot drive the ship onward. Not until the ship is in its element again
can it regain its course.
She considers the primary — and rather primal, really — focus of the writer:
For the novelist the only element is human life as he
finds it in himself or outside himself. The sole test of his work is
whether or not his energy is producing more of that life. Are his
creatures alive? That is the only question. And who can tell him? Who
but those living human beings, the people? Those people are not absorbed
in what art is or how it is made — are not, indeed, absorbed in
anything very lofty, however good it is. No, they are absorbed only in
themselves, in their own hungers and despairs and joys and above all,
perhaps, in their own dreams. These are the ones who can really judge
the work of the novelist, for they judge by that single test of reality.
And the standard of the test is not to be made by the device of art,
but by the simple comparison of the reality of what they read, to their
own reality.
While William Faulkner, in his own Nobel acceptance speech,
asserted that the writer’s role is to be a booster of the human spirit
and its highest potentiality, Buck argues that the writer’s primary
responsibility is to bear witness to human imperfection and, in the act
of witnessing, to offer an assurance and an affirmation of our
aliveness:
I have been taught, therefore, that though the novelist
may see art as cool and perfect shapes, he may only admire them as he
admires marble statues standing aloof in a quiet and remote gallery; for
his place is not with them. His place is in the street. He is happiest
there. The street is noisy and the men and women are not perfect in the
technique of their expression as the statues are. They are ugly and
imperfect, incomplete even as human beings, and where they come from and
where they go cannot be known. But they are people and therefore
infinitely to be preferred to those who stand upon the pedestals of art.
A visual history of Nobel Prizes and laureates. Click image for details.
Margaret Mead is celebrated as the world’s best-known and most influential cultural anthropologist, having not only popularized anthropology itself but also laid the foundation for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. She brought the essential tools of anthropology — the art of looking, coupled with a great capacity for listening, for asking and answering questions — to her prolific university lectures, public talks, and presentations at various organizations that claimed her time and thought. In the sixteen-year period between 1963 and January of 1979, Redbook Magazine published Mead’s answers to the best questions she had received from audience members over her extensive career — questions about love, sex, religion, politics, social dynamics, gender equality, personal choices, and the human condition.
On December 10, 1938, novelist, essayist, and civil rights activist Pearl S. Buck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.” Buck was born in China to American missionary parents and spent the first four decades of her life living there — an experience she wove into her beloved book The Good Earth, which had won the Pulitzer Prize six years earlier. Although three other women had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature prior to Buck, she was and remains the youngest female laureate — at 46, she was nineteen years younger than the average laureate in the category and the third-youngest to that point, after Rudyard Kipling and, only narrowly, Harry Sinclair Lewis. The only younger laureate since Buck has been Albert Camus.
A visual history of Nobel Prizes and laureates. Click image for details.
