Anzia Yezierska(1880-1970)

The exact year of Anzia Yezierska's birth is a mystery: various sources give it as 1880, 1881, or 1885. Her family emigrated to the United States in the 1890's, part of the great wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. They settled on the Lower East Side of New York. Yezierska had only a few years of formal schooling before beginning a series of menial jobs in order to support her family. She nevertheless succeeded in winning a scholarship to Columbia University Teachers College, and went on to teach elementary school in New York from 1908-1913. Her first stories were published in 1915. All of Yezierska's fiction is to some degree autobiographical. 'Bread Givers,' for example, is a thinly-disguised account of her rebellion against her tyrannical father, and 'Salome of the Tenements,' while based in part on the real-life social reformer Rose Pastor Stokes, also draws on Yezierska's brief romantic involvement with the philosopher John Dewey. Yezierska was a popular author in her day, but her lifelong distaste for wealth and those who possessed it made her uneasy with her own success. She summed up her ambivalence in the essay 'This is What $10,000 Did to Me,' an account of her experience in Hollywood while working on 'Hungry Hearts (1923)', which was based on her stories.