Background
Gilden was born in Bangor, Maine and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1935.
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Katya Gilden
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Radcliffe College; Harvard University.
Career
The couple produced two major novels, Hurry Sundown (1964), which was made into an Otto Preminger film in 1967, and Between the Hills and the Sea (1971), published the year of Bert"s death. While an undergraduate, she was the first woman to publish in the Harvard Advocate, submitting a poem, and a story about a fight between a black and white boxer. The themes of race, gender, and inequality would resurface in her later novels.
Hurry Sundown is about black and white Southern sharecroppers, and Between the Hills and the Sea about factory workers and labor relations in the 1940s-50s.
The Gildens considered themselves "novelist of the world of work", and were heavily influenced by essays on proletarian fiction by György Lukács. Hurry Sundown was a best-seller, but was largely panned by critics.
One criticism of the book was its extreme length (1046 pages). Time called it a "punch-card novel" because of its predictability, and the Chicago Tribune called it "a novel lost in its own maze".
Nonetheless, the Gildens sold the movie rights to Paramount for an unprecedented $795,000.
Gilden lived the later part of her life in Cambridge, Massachusetts and died in Boston. She had three children.
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Born
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Died
March 5, 1991 (aged 76) -
Nationality
American