The Connecticut Baby

The Connecticut Baby
Author: Barry Oliver
Publisher: AB Discovery
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2022-07-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Delilah Perkins has a family secret that is about to be discovered. At 109 years of age and nearing the end of her time, Delilah’s descendants number in the dozens. She lives in a home surrounded by photos of her memories spanning over a century. 21-year-old Zachary Perkins, one of Delilah's forty great-grandchildren, is just starting his life, only months away from his college graduation. While paying a final visit to the family matriarch, Zachary uncovers an old photograph that reveals Delilah's secret - a long-lost child, unknown to anyone in the Perkins family. What happens next is simply beyond Zachary's comprehension. He is transported back to Delilah's past where he experiences her family secret in the first person, incredibly as the very child same in the photograph. It is the Summer of 1922. The United States is crawling out of its post-war (World War I) recession. The 1920s are at last beginning to roar. Zachary discovers not only Delilah's long-lost child, but the long-lost life of a woman heretofore unknown to the Perkins family. He uncovers a lifetime buried on the distant side of a World War and the Great Depression; the lifetime of the beautiful and free-spirited Delilah Hayes at just 21 years, his own age in the present time. Over the course of the Summer, Zachary becomes more and more attached to Delilah's past. He falls in love with the coastal town of New Orchard, Connecticut, where Delilah got her start; along with the quirky people who inhabit his young great grandmother's life. Zachary begins to feel that Delilah’s past, in fact, belongs to himself; that this is the life he was supposed to live. Zachary questions whether he is even in the past at all. He asks the question: would it be possible to abandon his future to remain in the year 1922? If he makes that fateful decision, what will become of the future Zachary Perkins living in the year 2010? More immediately, if he stays, what will become of the two-year-old boy who was Delilah's first child?

Imitation of Life

Imitation of Life
Author: Fannie Hurst
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2004-12-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0822386070

A bestseller in 1933, and subsequently adapted into two beloved and controversial films, Imitation of Life has played a vital role in ongoing conversations about race, femininity, and the American Dream. Bea Pullman, a white single mother, and her African American maid, Delilah Johnston, also a single mother, rear their daughters together and become business partners. Combining Bea’s business savvy with Delilah’s irresistible southern recipes, they build an Aunt Jemima-like waffle business and an international restaurant empire. Yet their public success brings them little happiness. Bea is torn between her responsibilities as a businesswoman and those of a mother; Delilah is devastated when her light-skinned daughter, Peola, moves away to pass as white. Imitation of Life struck a chord in the 1930s, and it continues to resonate powerfully today. The author of numerous bestselling novels, a masterful short story writer, and an outspoken social activist, Fannie Hurst was a major celebrity in the first half of the twentieth century. Daniel Itzkovitz’s introduction situates Imitation of Life in its literary, biographical, and cultural contexts, addressing such topics as the debates over the novel and films, the role of Hurst’s one-time secretary and great friend Zora Neale Hurston in the novel’s development, and the response to the novel by Hurst’s friend Langston Hughes, whose one-act satire, “Limitations of Life” (which reverses the races of Bea and Delilah), played to a raucous Harlem crowd in the late 1930s. This edition brings a classic of popular American literature back into print.

Report

Report
Author: United States. Congress Senate
Publisher:
Total Pages: 2400
Release:
Genre: United States
ISBN: