Lenore Marshall

Lenore Guinzberg Marshall (September 7, 1899, New York City – September 23, 1971, Doylestown, Pennsylvania) was an American poet, novelist, and activist.

Life

She was the daughter of Harry and Leonie (Kleinert) Guinzburg. She graduated from Barnard College in 1919.^[1]

She married James Marshall, son of famed New York lawyer, Louis Marshall. Lenore and James had two children, Ellen and Jonathan; they lived in New York City. James served on the Board of Education in New York City for seventeen years, including as its president. He called for the creation of UNESCO during World War II.^[2]

From 1929 to 1932, Lenore Marshall worked as an editor at Cape and Smith, where she was instrumental getting them to publish The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner.^[3] She also edited As I Lay Dying.^[4]

Her work appeared in Harper's,^[5] and The New Yorker.

Activism

In 1933, she became the treasurer of the Writers' League Against Lynching,^[6][7] and corresponded with Theodore Dreiser,^[8] who was a member, and who wrote the anti-lynching story "Nigger Jeff".^[9]

In 1956, with Norman Cousins, she helped found SANE, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.^[10] She continued her anti-nuclear work with the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility.^[11] She corresponded with Irving Howe.^[12]

I am not embattled. I'm battling, and that makes life so much more interesting.^[13]

She lived at the Dorset Hotel, and New Hope, Pennsylvania.^[11] In 1971, she was on the board of PEN.^[14]

Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize is given each year by the Academy of American Poets.The Prize was created in 1975 by the New Hope Foundation of Pennsylvania, which, until 1987, was a philanthropic foundation created by Lenore Marshall and her husband, James Marshall, to "support the arts and the cause of world peace";^[15][16] Lenore Marshall, a poet, novelist, editor, and peace activist, had died in 1971.^[17]

Awards

• MacDowell Colony Fellow^[18]

Works

Poetry

• No Boundary. H. Holt. 1943.
• Other Knowledge: Poems New and Selected. Noonday Press. 1956.
• Marshall, Lenore (2002) [1969]. Latest Will: New and Selected Poems. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-32408-2.

Fiction

• Only the Fear. Macmillan. 1935.
• Hall of Mirrors. Macmillan. 1937.
• The Hill Is Level. Random House. 1959.
• The Confrontation, and Other Stories. Norton. 1972. ISBN 978-0-393-08448-1.

Memoir

• Janice Farrar Thaddeus, ed. (1979). Invented a Person: The Personal Record of a Life. Horizon Press. ISBN 978-0-8180-0231-1.

Non-fiction

• "William Faulkner: Man and Writer -- A Special Section". Saturday Review. New York. XLV (29). July 28, 1962.
• Daniela Gioseffi, ed. (2003). "Political Activism and Art". Women on war. Feminist Press. pp. 232–233. ISBN 978-1-55861-409-3.

Anthologies

• Where is Vietnam? American Poets Respond: an Anthology of Contemporary Poems. Anchor Books. 1967.

Reviews

On The Hill is Level: "It is a novel of philosophical ideas and of literary culture, of moral idealism and social criticism. The central theme is a woman's struggle to emancipate herself and lead a good life."^[19]

"Her prose is freshest when it is specific, describing a union organizer with great affection or an advocate of nuclear weapons with unusual cruelty. There are passages about her children written with wide-open eyes and a generous heart. When she deals more generally with Literature or Politics or Life, she sometimes gets fuzzy or even affected."^[20]

References

1. http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/marshall-lenore-guinzburg
2. http://www.michenermuseum.org/bucksartists/artist.php?artist=144&page=590
3. Ben Wasson, Carvel Collins (2006). Count No 'Count. Univ. Press of Mississippi. p. 94. ISBN 978-1-57806-879-1.
4. "Notes on the Textual History of The Sound and the Fury", James B. Meriwether, footnote 9
5. http://www.harpers.org/archive/1968/08/0015541
6. Perkins, Kathy A; Stephens, Judith Louise (1998-01-01). "Strange fruit: Plays on lynching by American women". ISBN 978-0-253-21163-7.
7. Walter White (1995). A man called White. University of Georgia Press. p. 167. ISBN 978-0-8203-1698-7.
8. https://books.google.com/books?id=DqNHNwAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:Lenore+inauthor:Marshall. Missing or empty |title= (help)
9. Anne P. Rice (2003). Witnessing lynching. Rutgers University Press. p. 151. ISBN 978-0-8135-3330-8.
10. Powers, Roger S; Vogele, William B; Kruegler, Christopher (1997). "Protest, power, and change: An encyclopedia of nonviolent action from ACT-UP to women's suffrage". ISBN 978-0-8153-0913-0.
11. http://www.michenermuseum.org/bucksartists/artist.php?artist=144
12. Sorin, Gerald (2002). "Irving Howe: A life of passionate dissent". ISBN 978-0-8147-9821-8.
13. "Lenore G. Marshall, 72, Dies; Was Poet, Novelist and Editor; Founder of Sane Nuclear Policy Group Published Three Volumes of Verse". The New York Times. September 25, 1971.
14. http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/480
15. "Lenore Marshall". James A. Michener Art Museum. Retrieved 2009-06-12.
16. Marshall, Jonathan. 2009. Dateline History: The Life of Jonathan Marshall. Phoenix: Acacia Publishers, p. 290.
17. "Lenore G. Marshall, 72, Dies; Was Poet, Novelist, and Editor". The New York Times. September 25, 1971.
18. http://www.macdowellcolony.org/artists-indexfellows.php
19. Maxwell Geismar, New York Times Book Review, cited in "Lenore G. Marshall, 72, Dies: Was Poet, Novelist, Editor", New York Times, September 25, 1971.
20. Walter Goodman (August 10, 1980). "Nonfiction in Brief". The New York Times.

External links