Josephine Young Case (1907–1990)
Auteur de At Midnight on the Thirty-First of March
A propos de l'auteur
Œuvres de Josephine Young Case
Written in Sand 3 exemplaires
Freedom's farm 2 exemplaires
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom légal
- Case, Josephine Young
- Date de naissance
- 1907-02-16
- Date de décès
- 1990-01-08
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- USA
- Lieu du décès
- Waterville, New York, USA
- Lieux de résidence
- Van Hornesville, New York, USA
- Études
- Brearley School, New York
Bryn Mawr College
Radcliffe College - Professions
- poet
novelist
teacher - Organisations
- Colgate University
- Courte biographie
- Josephine Young Case was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, the daughter of Owen D. Young, chairman of the General Electric Company and founder of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and his wife Josephine Edmonds Young. She was educated at the Brearley School in New York and graduated from Bryn Mawr College. In 1931, she married Everett Needham Case and received an M.A. in American literature from Radcliffe College. Her first book of poetry, At Midnight on the 31st of March, was published in 1938. For 20 years, Mrs. Case taught a literature course at Colgate University, where her husband became president. She also published an historical novel, Written in Sand (1945); another collection of poetry, Freedom's Farm (1946); and a biography of her father, Owen D. Young and American Enterprise (1982). She became the first female director of RCA in 1961. She also served on the boards of Bryn Mawr, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, the Girl Scouts of America, and the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.
A trustee of Skidmore College for many years, Mrs. Case became chairwoman of the board in 1960.
Membres
Critiques
Freedom's Farm par Josephine Young Case
A short book of poems by Josephine Young Case. One of them, "March," hit way too close to home during this pandemic spring. "She was married only a short time to her first husband" made me laugh out loud. Clare Leighton's woodcuts are beautiful accompaniments to the poetry.
½
One of the finest fantasy poems ever written. Predating by some years the now too common 'most everyone is gone save us' plots, Case covers a year of a small town and its inhabitants trying to get in a strange new world. Highly recommended.
Back in 2007 when I read and loved her At Midnight on the Thirty-First of March (my review here) I hunted around online and bought up copies of the rest of Josephine Young Case's books (Freedom's Farm, Written in Sand, and This Very Tree). I stumbled across them on my shelves yesterday and pulled This Very Tree (Houghton Mifflin, 1969) off and started reading. It's a short book (just 118 pages), but proved a really nice way to spend an hour or so on the porch.
Our narrator is the wife of the president of a small liberal arts college in rural upstate New York. Looking for something to do in her spare time, she volunteers to help a retired professor who's working on a history of "the College" from its orgins to the present. At the same time, she's helping her husband cope with a famous alumnus of the College, who wants to give a very large gift ... but to build a "Tower of Trade, housing the G. Tuckerman Butterweck School of Commerce," not the desperately-needed new library. It's a timeless meditation on the difficult dilemmas faced by all similar institutions: donor desires versus the actual needs and priorities of the place.
I won't spoil the plot, since you ought to read the book yourself (Case's books, while out of print, can be obtained quite afforably online); in fact for this one I'd go so far as to say that it ought to be required reading for the trustees and administrators of all small liberal arts colleges and non-profit institutions. A bit saccharine though it may be, it's also a really poignant story, with moments of real humor and insight.
Case knew of what she spoke. Her husband was president of Colgate, and Case herself was Chairman of the Board of Trustees at Skidmore for many years. Her descriptions of small colleges and the characters who populate them ring true: I found myself nodding along so many times. She examines the internal musings of alumni, back for Homecoming: "I understand that what they want to say and cannot is: We deeply cherish this place, these lawns, these trees, these very stones, because of what went on here, without and within. With this ground we are more nearly one than elsewhere, it is forever part of us, from mornings when the first warmth of spring touched the snowbanks, from nights when the moon glittered on the river, from October days like this one: for here, then, voices spoke to us, from books, from men, from the trees and stones themselves, perhaps once only, or again" (p. 11).
A troubled student who comes to her for advice is described as "badly afflicted with Wanderlust and Weltschmerz and all the things with German names that torture the young" (p. 35). The retired professor describes a predecessor this way: "He looked like a woodchuck in his study; his papers and books made a burrow around him. I think he liked the physical presence of books more than reading them; they were good to build burrows with" (p. 9). (That particular line brought to mind a couple of my favorite professors).
A lovely little book, and really well produced by Houghton Mifflin.
http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2012/05/book-review-this-very-tree.html… (plus d'informations)
Our narrator is the wife of the president of a small liberal arts college in rural upstate New York. Looking for something to do in her spare time, she volunteers to help a retired professor who's working on a history of "the College" from its orgins to the present. At the same time, she's helping her husband cope with a famous alumnus of the College, who wants to give a very large gift ... but to build a "Tower of Trade, housing the G. Tuckerman Butterweck School of Commerce," not the desperately-needed new library. It's a timeless meditation on the difficult dilemmas faced by all similar institutions: donor desires versus the actual needs and priorities of the place.
I won't spoil the plot, since you ought to read the book yourself (Case's books, while out of print, can be obtained quite afforably online); in fact for this one I'd go so far as to say that it ought to be required reading for the trustees and administrators of all small liberal arts colleges and non-profit institutions. A bit saccharine though it may be, it's also a really poignant story, with moments of real humor and insight.
Case knew of what she spoke. Her husband was president of Colgate, and Case herself was Chairman of the Board of Trustees at Skidmore for many years. Her descriptions of small colleges and the characters who populate them ring true: I found myself nodding along so many times. She examines the internal musings of alumni, back for Homecoming: "I understand that what they want to say and cannot is: We deeply cherish this place, these lawns, these trees, these very stones, because of what went on here, without and within. With this ground we are more nearly one than elsewhere, it is forever part of us, from mornings when the first warmth of spring touched the snowbanks, from nights when the moon glittered on the river, from October days like this one: for here, then, voices spoke to us, from books, from men, from the trees and stones themselves, perhaps once only, or again" (p. 11).
A troubled student who comes to her for advice is described as "badly afflicted with Wanderlust and Weltschmerz and all the things with German names that torture the young" (p. 35). The retired professor describes a predecessor this way: "He looked like a woodchuck in his study; his papers and books made a burrow around him. I think he liked the physical presence of books more than reading them; they were good to build burrows with" (p. 9). (That particular line brought to mind a couple of my favorite professors).
A lovely little book, and really well produced by Houghton Mifflin.
http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2012/05/book-review-this-very-tree.html… (plus d'informations)
A friend recently asked me to try and locate a copy of Josephine Young Case's At Midnight on the Thirty-First of March, an out-of-print title most recently published in 1990 by Syracuse University Press (it was originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1938). When the book finally arrived yesterday (after an interminably long wait), I decided to dip into it for a few minutes ... famous last words, I know. After just the first few pages, I was hooked; I couldn't get anything done until I'd read the whole darn thing (thankfully at just 132 pages it only took most of the evening and just cut a few hours out of my night's sleep).
Written entirely in blank verse, At Midnight is the story of the sleepy upstate New York town of Saugersville, whose occupants suddenly (at midnight, on the 31st of March) finds themselves entirely cut off from the outside world. The roads mysteriously end just outside of town; electricity, radio and phone transmissions simply don't exist. The people of Saugersville are alone. The poem tracks the community through an entire year, as residents adjust to life without gasoline, new supplies, or news from beyond their little valley (or even the knowledge that any human life exists beyond their town). They struggle to revise their lives, debate what should be taught to their children in school (one of the most interesting segments), and all in their own ways try to cope with their new situation. Some, of course, are more successful in this than others.
Midway through the year, one of the community's leaders muses, internally, on life as it has become. I think this has tremendous power to speak to us today living in the age that we do - perhaps even more power than it had to Ms. Case's audience back in the late 1930s.
"'What will become of us? We seem to be
The only human beings left alive.
If there are ever going to be again
Races of men, and cities, governments, -
At least upon this continent, like us,
Americans, - we are their fathers now,
And they depends on us and what we bring.
I do not think this can be really so.
There must be other villages alive.
One day we will discover them, they us,
And meeting fall to talking of a day
When we were all so near we did not care
Who lived or died or what became of us,
Too sure of everything - heat, light and power
And public education and the roads, -
Too little parts of a machine too great
For us to understand, or anyone,
So that we blamed ourselves no more at all
For anything that happened - that was bad;
I guess we took some credit for the good -
Complaining always of the government
Or capital, or labor, or the weather.
The last is all we can complain of now
With no one to account for but ourselves,
And near enough to see where blame is due,
If blame there is where everyone works hard
And does his best to keep himself alive.'"
It's a frightening scenario, and one that's pretty difficult to think about. Case's poem is imaginative, poignant and eerie, with very careful pacing as well as opening and closing sections which are just unforgettable. It deserves a wider audience.
http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2007/06/book-review-at-midnight-on-31st-of.html (originally posted 19 June 2007)… (plus d'informations)
Written entirely in blank verse, At Midnight is the story of the sleepy upstate New York town of Saugersville, whose occupants suddenly (at midnight, on the 31st of March) finds themselves entirely cut off from the outside world. The roads mysteriously end just outside of town; electricity, radio and phone transmissions simply don't exist. The people of Saugersville are alone. The poem tracks the community through an entire year, as residents adjust to life without gasoline, new supplies, or news from beyond their little valley (or even the knowledge that any human life exists beyond their town). They struggle to revise their lives, debate what should be taught to their children in school (one of the most interesting segments), and all in their own ways try to cope with their new situation. Some, of course, are more successful in this than others.
Midway through the year, one of the community's leaders muses, internally, on life as it has become. I think this has tremendous power to speak to us today living in the age that we do - perhaps even more power than it had to Ms. Case's audience back in the late 1930s.
"'What will become of us? We seem to be
The only human beings left alive.
If there are ever going to be again
Races of men, and cities, governments, -
At least upon this continent, like us,
Americans, - we are their fathers now,
And they depends on us and what we bring.
I do not think this can be really so.
There must be other villages alive.
One day we will discover them, they us,
And meeting fall to talking of a day
When we were all so near we did not care
Who lived or died or what became of us,
Too sure of everything - heat, light and power
And public education and the roads, -
Too little parts of a machine too great
For us to understand, or anyone,
So that we blamed ourselves no more at all
For anything that happened - that was bad;
I guess we took some credit for the good -
Complaining always of the government
Or capital, or labor, or the weather.
The last is all we can complain of now
With no one to account for but ourselves,
And near enough to see where blame is due,
If blame there is where everyone works hard
And does his best to keep himself alive.'"
It's a frightening scenario, and one that's pretty difficult to think about. Case's poem is imaginative, poignant and eerie, with very careful pacing as well as opening and closing sections which are just unforgettable. It deserves a wider audience.
http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2007/06/book-review-at-midnight-on-31st-of.html (originally posted 19 June 2007)… (plus d'informations)
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JBD1 | 1 autre critique | May 28, 2012 |
JBD1 | 1 autre critique | May 28, 2012 | Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 6
- Membres
- 35
- Popularité
- #405,584
- Évaluation
- 4.5
- Critiques
- 4
- ISBN
- 3