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January 2: Jo Sinclair

lawrencebush
January 2, 2013

Jo Sinclair (Ruth Seid), a novelist and short story writer who wrote about immigrant families, race relations, homophobia, and gender identity in America, won the biennial Harper and Brothers contest for the best novel about American life on this date in 1946 for her manuscript, The Wasteland. Sinclair had been employed by the WPA writers project for five years and had sold her first short story to Esquire in 1936. The $10,000 prize put her on secure enough economic footing to pursue her writing full-time, and she published her second highly-regarded novel, The Changelings, in 1955. Depicting a Jewish neighborhood in the process of becoming a black neighborhood, The Changelings won the Jewish Book Council of America annual fiction award and was nominated for a Pulitzer. Sinclair, a lesbian for much of her adult life, published four novels, many short stories, and a volume of memoirs, The Seasons: Death and Transfiguration, before dying in 1995 at 81.
“Sinclair’s works explore the repercussions of oppression in many forms: self-denial and self-destruction, antisemitism and Jewish self-hatred, continued psychic pain due to childhood suffering and dysfunctional family relations, repression of women’s sexual energy and sexual orientation, racism and the internalization of prejudice, poverty, and other forms of marginalization. Her work looks to self-knowledge as a means of emerging from one’s internalized ghetto.” —Sara R. Horowitz, Jewish Women’s Archive

JEWDAYO ROCKS! Randy California, lead guitarist of Spirit, died on this date in 1997.