Description:
Masterfully portrays a woman gaining her inner force to refuse compromise, it evokes a sense of the power of the heart to transform one's self, to make claims on what's rightfully one's own.
Brief description: Margot Livesey (born 1953) is a Scottish-born writer. She is the author of nine novels, a collection of short stories, a collection of essays on writing and the co-author, with Lynn Klamkin, of a textbook. Among other awards, she has earned a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the PEN New England Award, and the Massachusetts Book Award.Livesey's stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and a number of literary quarterlies. She was formerly the fiction editor at Ploughshares, an American literary journal. Livesey served as a judge for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction in 2012.She currently divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Iowa City, Iowa, where she is a member of the faculty at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. She has also taught at Boston University, Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon University, Cleveland State University, Emerson College, Tufts University, the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, and Williams College. She has frequently been a faculty member at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers' conferences, among other conferences.
Review Quotes:
I was enthralled by THE MARRIAGE OF ANNA MAYE POTTS. It's really a fine novel-the specifics of the factory are great; the range and depth of the characters, the inexorable convergence of Anna and Louie, all seem just right. I felt I was reading about the kind of people seen too seldom in fiction, real people in the grip of real lives
--Margot Livesey,
author of The Road From Belhaven and The Boy In The Field
DeWitt Henry masterfully portrays a woman gaining an inner force, which she refused to compromise. The novel evokes in the reader a sense of the power of the heart and the will to transform one's self-and to make claims on what's rightfully one's own.
--Jack Smith
Contributions To Literature: A Tribute To Small Press Books
A powerful picture of an American family in a time of radical changes. Deeply compassionate, yet utterly unsentimental, the story is built around the joys and sorrows of ordinary people, people we can believe in and will remember, people whose lives and hopes matter. This novel introduces a gifted writer whose achievement is admirable.
--Georger Garrett
Author of The Succession
Drawing on the French realist tradition of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, and with a sophisticated nod to New Wave British kitchen sink realism of the 1950s and 60s, DeWitt Henry's novel The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts crackles with the searing energy of the American working-class lives it depicts. In poignant, poised and gritty prose, Henry's novel exposes the socio-political challenges, gender discrimination and hardship faced by Anna Maye Potts and her contemporaries. Expressions and explorations of the quotidian, banal and the mundane are nimbly and insightfully juxtaposed with extraordinary moments of strength and resilience in subversive recastings of "ordinary, simple; people ... just people, lives just lives.
--Cassandra Atherton
Author of Prose Poetry: An Introduction,
Princeton University Press
Mr. Henry is a realist, a naturalist even; his heroes are writers like Brian Moore and Richard Yates, and there is barely the least hint of flashiness in his whole operation. In fact, if you want to compare with lates, I'd say THE MARRIAGE OF ANNA MAYE POTTS is much 'thicker' than any of his (except for REVOLUTIONARY ROAD maybe), thick with the texture of candy factory and hospital and YWCA and driving in traffic... The book is outstanding in that way
--William H. Pritchard
Author of Updike: America's Man Of Letters
Mr. Henry has taken on the difficult task of portraying quite ordinary' people with lives that seem outwardly colorless and tedious and going so deeply into the texture of their work and dreams and relationships that they become vivid and compelling characters.
--Dan Wakefield
Author of Going All The Way
I was especially impressed by the texture of the book, its attention to family (that subject so wonderfully out of fashion), to class in a way that is so rare these days. The writer I kept thinking about throughout was John O'Hara.
--Jay Neugeboren
Author of Big Man