represent the challenges and competing realities of
the future. Richardson’s play offers a sobering
glimpse into African-American family life and the
devastating collateral effects of racism.
Bibliography
Gray, Christine Rauchfuss. Willis Richardson, Forgotten Pi-
oneer of African-American Drama.Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1999.
“If Wishes Were Horses” Edythe Mae Gordon
(1929)
A short story by EDYTHEMAEGORDONthat ap-
peared in the BOSTON-based SATURDAYEVENING
QUILL. The sparse but riveting plot revolves
around a husband and father named Fred Pomeroy.
During an outing with his daughter, he encounters
a fortune-teller who predicts that his wife will have
her wishes come true and that he will “be the
maker of her dreams.” Pomeroy cannot imagine
how he, an overworked and underpaid sales clerk,
will be able to finance such a promising future. His
efforts to publish short fiction have yet to result in
acceptance or publication. That night he dies in
bed, and several weeks after his passing, his wife
Rachel receives an insurance check in the amount
of $50,000. The story closes as a neighbor learns of
the grand trip that the widowed Rachel Pomeroy is
taking with her daughter Dorothea.
Gordon’s pointed story is a compelling tale of
modern domesticity.
Bibliography
Gordon, Edythe Mae. Selected Works of Edythe Mae Gor-
don.Introduction by Lorraine Elena Roses. New
York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996.
Imitation of Life Fannie Hurst(1933)
A novel by the prolific author FANNIE HURST.
Originally entitled Sugar House,the book was pub-
lished in 1933 by HARPER&BROTHERS. Hurst
conceived the idea for the novel during her fall
1931 travels to Canada with ZORA NEALE
HURSTON, the brilliant writer and anthropologist
whose BARNARDCOLLEGEstudies she financed.
The book was released in serial installments in Pic-
torial Reviewand published separately by Harper.
Within three months, Hurst had sold the movie
rights to Universal. Director John Stahl produced
the 1934 version of the film that starred Louise
Beavers, Claudette Colbert, and Fredi Washington.
In 1959 Douglas Sirk directed the remake of Imita-
tion of Life.This version featured Lana Turner and
Juanita Moore in the main roles. The second film
transformed the original relationship between the
two protagonists into a problematic hierarchical
relationship that reinforced current racial expecta-
tions and denigrating stereotypes.
The story followed the evolving partnership of
two New Jersey widows, Bea Pullman and Delilah
Johnson. Pullman is destitute and overwhelmed by
the loss of her husband, the demands of her infant
daughter, and the responsibility for caring for her
paralyzed father. She hires Johnson as a live-in
housekeeper, and the two women do their best to
make ends meet. Bea creates a plan to market
Delilah’s exquisite waffles and maple syrup. The
business plan succeeds beyond their wildest dreams.
The women become millionaires as their cottage
industry becomes a national phenomenon. Despite
their financial success, however, both women are
challenged by the predicaments in which their
daughters find themselves.
Hurst explores the politics of domesticity in
the interracial friendship between Bea and Delilah,
whose daughters grow up together. Delilah’s
daughter Peola, a light-skinned girl of color, wants
to pass for white. Contemporary reviewers of the
novel tended to focus more on the evolution of
Bea Pullman rather than on the complicated de-
sires of Peola Johnson or her mother.
Imitation of Life was an extremely popular
novel, one that revived the literary tradition of the
tragic mulatto plot and shed new light on early
20th-century domesticity.Bibliography
Caputi, Jane. “‘Specifying’ Fannie Hurst: Langston
Hughes’s ‘Limitations of Life,’ Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God,and Toni Morrison’s
The Bluest Eyeas ‘Answers’ to Hurst’s ‘Imitation of
Life,’” Black American Literature Forum24, no. 4
(winter 1990): 697–716.
Kroeger, Brooke. Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer
Fannie Hurst.New York: Random House, 1999.In Abraham’s BosomPaul Green(1926)
The PULITZER PRIZE–winning drama by white
North Carolina playwright and professor PAUL
GREEN. Critics hailed the play for its unrelentingIn Abraham’s Bosom 267