Marya Zaturenska's Depression Diary 1933-1935

Abstract

IN THE DEPRESSION-ERA DIARY of the poet Marya Zaturenska (1902-1982), one meets many of the most influential writers and artists ofthe time: there is Archibald MacLeish at a literary tea, Edward Hopper at the Whitney Museum, Dorothy Parker at a political meeting, T. S. Eliot and Herbert Read at dinner in London. Figures from a more distant past often appear in Zaturenska's insightful commentary on the books she is reading. To her diary, now at Syracuse, she also confides her literary hopes and struggles, her exquisite aesthetic perceptions, her maternal feelings, and her overwhelming anxieties about money, health, and the literary reputation ofher husband, Horace Gregory (1898-1982).