The Literary Twenties

This series was held at the Birmingham [UK] and Midland Institute, from 10 am to 4 pm on three different Saturdays, and was very well-received. Cost was £20/day which included lunch. For more information, or to set up similar presentations, e-mail me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

‘Such Friends’: The Literary Twenties:

Saturdays, 8^th and 22^nd May, and 5^th June, 2010

London, the Hogarth Press and Mrs. Dalloway

As the Bloomsbury group drifted apart at the beginning of World War I, Virginia and Leonard Woolf established their own publishing company, Hogarth Press, to produce her novels and works by their friends. Includes a showing of the film The Hours, based on Michael Cunningham’s book about Virginia writing Mrs. Dalloway and two women in 1950s and 1990s America reading it.

Paris, Shakespeare & Co. and the Contact Press

Ernest Hemingway and other Americans in Paris were published by the ‘little mags’ and writer Robert McAlmon’s Contact Press, financed with the inheritance of his British lesbian wife. And an American bookshop owner, Sylvia Beach, published James Joyce’s Ulysses. Includes showing of the documentary Paris Was a Woman featuring rare newsreel footage and interviews with Beach and others.

New York, The New Yorker and Scribner’s

In 1920s Manhattan, publishing was becoming a big business, with writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway being guided by legendary editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s, and the Algonquin Round Table wits contributing to the new magazine, The New Yorker. Includes showing of the film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle about the group of friends who lunched regularly at the Algonquin Hotel.