Background
Gollin, Rita Kaplan was born on January 22, 1928 in Brooklyn. Daughter of Max and Sophie (Horowitz) Kaplan.
( A comprehensive biography of an exemplary woman, this b...)
A comprehensive biography of an exemplary woman, this book tells the story of Annie Adams Fields (1834--1915), one of the leading figures in nineteenth-century Boston's cultural circles. Although often defined in terms of her famous husband, publisher James T. Fields of Ticknor & Fields, she was, as this book demonstrates, a person of significant intellectual and social accomplishments in her own right. After Fields entered her remarkable companionate marriage at age twenty, she was welcomed into friendship by such eminent writers as Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Dickens. But it was not simply as a dutiful wife that she invited Emerson to lecture to a group of friends in the library of her home, or did literary research for Harriet Beecher Stowe, or advised her husband on submissions to the Atlantic Monthly. As Rita K. Gollin shows, Fields also pursued her own imperatives of self-fulfillment and service to others. A published poet, essayist, and novelist, she also wrote dozens of biographies of famous writers she had known. She founded innovative charities for Boston's poor and campaigned for women's issues, including the right to vote and to be admitted to medical schools. These pursuits continued after she was widowed in 1881 and began a loving partnership with Sarah Orne Jewett -- a "Boston marriage" that ended only with Jewett's death in 1909. A shrewd nurturer of many women writers -- Rebecca Harding Davis, Lucy Larcom, and Willa Cather among them -- and the trusted friend of many illustrious men, Fields learned to move vigorously within the public sphere without violating traditional proprieties-as a woman, as an effective social reformer, and as a writer with wares to promote in the burgeoning literary marketplace. Fields emerges from this thoroughly researched and highly readable work as a woman who both absorbed and challenged the sometimes conflicting values of her time, gender, and class.
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Gollin, Rita Kaplan was born on January 22, 1928 in Brooklyn. Daughter of Max and Sophie (Horowitz) Kaplan.
She attended Queens College for undergraduate studies before earning her Doctor of Philosophy in English from the University of Minnesota in 1961.
Gollin is Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at the State University of New York at Geneseo. Gollin is a scholar of the life and works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, on whom she has authored several books and many articles Her 1979 book, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Truth of Dreams, published by the Louisiana State University Press, is consistently included on Hawthorne bibliographies.
Her later publications pursued visual-textual studies, focusing on the iconography of Hawthorne portraiture, and a biography of Hawthorne"s publisher"s wife, "Annie Adams Fields, Woman of Letters." Gollin has also edited scholarly editions of Hawthorne"s best-known novel, The Scarlet Letter.
Her awards and services include National Endowment for Humanities grants, and Presidencies of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society and of the Northeast Modern Language Association. Upon retirement, Gollin endowed the Gollin Scholarship for Excellence in American Literature with the Department of English at Geneseo. The award goes to one graduating senior and one junior who have demonstrated excellence in the study of American Literature.
( A comprehensive biography of an exemplary woman, this b...)
(Book by Gollin, Rita)
Member Modern Language Association (chair 19th Century American Literature division, chair American literature selection committee), American Literature Association, N.E. Modern Language Association (president), Nathaniel Hawthorne Society (president), Phi Beta Kappa.
Married Richard M. Gollin, January 1, 1950. Children: Kathryn Gollin Marshak, Michael, James.