The Underrepresented Modernism Project.

“Prejudice is a seeping, dark stain, I think, more difficult to fight than hatred-which is powerful and violent and somehow more honest.” -Josephine Lawrence

During her life, Josephine Lawrence wrote thirty-three novels and over one hundred children’s books. Her 1937 novel Years Are So Long was adapted into the Hollywood classic film Make Way for Tomorrow, and her 1938 novel The Sound of Running Feet, a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction¹. Her work dealt nearly exclusively with the struggles of working-class American citizens.  Her novels included simple characters, similar to those of ordinary people. She did not bother herself with the melodrama of the great literary characters. Lawrence’s focus was on the struggles familiar to her. Her style was self-admitted to be simple, as she explains in an interview, “Talk of such matters as my writing style doesn’t seem to help anyone, I’m no Shakespeare; I can’t write brilliant, beautiful phrases, open up a world with a sentence, and I know I can’t and never try.”² Despite her clear literary prowess and success during her time, Josephine Lawerence’s name has all but been forgotten by modern readers and critics. It is clear, however, that her work was important to its audience at the time, it spoke to what many American people were going through during the Great Depression. Although she would probably never admit it herself (Lawrence was both an intensely private person and notoriously humble), she pioneered writing about the distortion and troubles of the American Dream in the novel. Her contribution to American Literature and her dedication to the depiction of middle-class American Life cements her as a Modernist writer and an underappreciated one at that.

Little is known about Lawrence’s personal life, she admitted in an interview that, “I am extremely interested in others, and extremely uncomfortable when they become interested in me.”³ What we do know is that Josephine Lawrence and her twin brother, Harlow, were born on March 12, 1889, in Newark, New Jersey. She attended public school and was an editor of her High School newspaper⁴. After high school, she took a few courses at NYU but never graduated. Then in 1915, she began working at the local Newark Newspaper, Newark Sunday Call, as the children’s page editor. It was here that Lawrence began to grow her literary skills, as she began writing what would later become a corpus of over one hundred children’s books. It was also at the Newark Sunday Call that she began her interest in the lives of everyday people. She became the editor of the household section of the newspaper, and it was here that she began to receive letters written to the section from the very people who she would later write about in her novels.⁵

In 1932, she made the decision to separate herself from her Juvenile writing and published her first novel, to little fanfare. It was not until she published her second novel, Years Are So Long, that her name and work began to circulate. Unfortunately, her earlier work remained the most recognized and celebrated out of her corpus. Despite the dwindling attention, she continued to write until her last book was published in 1975. While she was not one for public attention, she was well-revered for her strict writing habits. She would go to work at the Newark Sunday Call, then come home and write for three hours every weekday. During the 1940s and 50s, she contributed multiple short stories to the newspaper, of a much lighter tone than her novels.⁶ While very little is known about her personal life, we know that in 1940 she married Artur Platz, and the couple moved out of Newark and to Manhattan. Little is known about their marriage, and they had no children. Josephine Lawrence died on February 22, 1978, at the age of 88, in her apartment in Manhattan. 

What makes her a modernist, and why she makes the list:

Josephine Lawrence’s work is unique for its time. Like many modernist greats, such as Virginia Woolf, Lawrence’s writing focused on the mundane, the actions of the everyday. But unlike Woolf and other contemporaries, Lawrence’s work focused on the lives of ordinary, middle and working-class people. She was not interested in flashy characters or extravagant settings. She wanted to explore how the American Dream infiltrated people’s lives, and how people reacted to it. Even more unique for her time, she wrote about the struggles of women and the familial dynamic that so many people were accustomed to. She wrote of men whose fathers were farmers, who were destined for the same line of blue-collar work, and wives who worked part-time jobs trying to bring an extra $15 a week to the family, all while raising children. 

It is often in literature that the voices and experiences of the everyday person are ignored, in favor of the far more interesting and provocative lives of the rich, famous, or simply different people. This is what makes Lawrence unique, and why I believe she should be considered as part of the modernist canon. Her experience in journalism brought a sense of realism to her work, “She brought a journalist’s eye to the contemporary scene, her goals as a novelist strikingly consistent with the aims of solid reporting.”⁷ Her goal was not to entertain the reader but to enlighten them on the mistakes and cliches that working-class people were subjected to. While a fairly conservative writer, she always sympathized with her characters and their situations. While doing this, she still maintained that the characters’ choices lead them to their circumstances. Whether that be financial turmoil or religious differences between characters, she empowered them to take control of their lives and stop blaming outside sources for their troubles.

Overall, Josephine Lawrence was a prolific and talented writer, who captured the essence of working-class Americans during the Great Depression, a feat that not many writers can claim. Her focus on the familial dynamic and simple writing style has, in my opinion, cemented her as a candidate for more mainstream recognition. 

A link to her work can be found here.

Bibliography

Fraser, C. Gerald. “Josephine Lawrence, 88, Author; Novelist of Middle‐class America.” The New York Times, February 24, 1978. https://www.nytimes.com/1978/02/24/archives/josephine-lawrence-88-author-novelist-of-middleclass-america-a.html. 

Johnson, D. A. (2015). Josephine Lawrence: A Writer of Her Time. Garden State Legacy(28) Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/eng_facpub/52

Johnson, Deidre. “Josephine Lawrence.” Josephine Lawrence – adult fiction, 1999. https://readseries.com/joslaw/joslaw2a.htm. 

McIntire, Carmela Pinto. 2011. “The Arithmetic of Aspiration: Josephine Lawrence’s If I Have Four Apples.” The Journal of American Culture 34 (2): 189–99. doi:10.1111/j.1542-734X.2011.00774.x.