About this item
This spring, with the publication of Bette Howland's CALM SEA AND PROSPEROUS VOYAGE, A Public Space Books restores to the literary canon an extraordinarily gifted writer, who was recognized as a major talent, with Guggenheim and MacArthur "genius" fellowships, before all but disappearing from public view for decades, until nearly the end of her life when she was rediscovered. Bette Howland herself was an outsider -- an intellectual from a Jewish working-class neighborhood in Chicago; a divorce and single mother, to the disapproval of her family; an artist chipped away at by poverty and self-doubt. Each of these facets plays a central role in her work. Saul Bellow, Howland's mentor, champion, and (for a time) lover, urged her to mine her deepest emotions for her art.
About the Author
Writer, critic, and MacArthur "Genius" grant recipient Bette Howland died last week at the age of 80. "No matter what her subject is, Mrs. Howland is always looking for the bone and marrow of Chicago," Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in a 1978 review of Blue in Chicago. "And always the prose with which she searches is arrhythmical, nervous, self-questioning, passionate. You can't fall into step with her, because the moment you do she shifts her cadence and takes off for another part of town, another time, another thing about Chicago. " However, though much awarded and clearly brilliant, she has in recent years been more-or-less forgotten by the literary establishment. "What happened to a career that held such talent and promise?" A.N. Devers asked in a 2015 piece about Howland and her rediscovery by Brigid Hughes, Howland was nomadic and often lived in isolation. Why did she retreat from what she had earned for herself? What role has the literary community played in allowing her work to fall from memory? Her son Jacob thinks the MacArthur is part of the answer. " Indeed, she didn't publish anything else after winning the award.
