Word: scarlets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last Autumn when Mrs. Peterkin announced a book called Scarlet Sister Mary, librarians throughout South Carolina ordered copies as a matter of course. They were a little taken aback to read the publisher's blurb that this was "the story of the harlot of Blue Brook Plantation.'' But since there are black harlots on some plantations, and everyone knows it, most South Carolina librarians read the book anyway and put it on the shelves...
...Librarian Mattie Pearson of Gaffney. She concluded that Scarlet Sister Mary was too promiscuous, even if she was the brainchild of Mrs. Peterkin. Mrs. Pearson saw to it that the book stayed off the public shelves of Gaffney. When Gaffneyans came asking for Scarlet Sister Mary they were told she had been suppressed for immorality...
That was when the Cherokee Times stepped in. Commercially it seemed a good bet to get permission, quickly granted, to publish Scarlet Sister Mary serially. Intellectually it was exciting for Editor-Publisher George B. Lay, 32, and his two young associates-Thomas Freeman and W. Wells Alexander, each 22-to awaken Gaffney from what they, as college men, called its "uncultured daze.'' Moreover, there was, as Mrs. Peterkin said in her letter to Mr. Lay, the possibility that Librarian Pearson had eaten something disagreeable the morning she proscribed the book...
Newspapers throughout the state had carried the news that Scarlet Sister Mary was too scarlet for Gaffney. Now they carried the story that the Cherokee Times had a scarlet serial. And next-great "scoop" for the Cherokee Times!-they carried news that Scarlet Sister Mary had won the Pulitzer Prize for 1928 as best U. S. novel of the year (TIME...
...Kansas City, Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Anderson learned that their son, Melvin, who was in a hospital, had died of scarlet fever. Mrs. Anderson fainted. Later the parents went to the O. V. Mast Undertaking Co., but were not allowed to see the body because of the danger of contagion. As they prepared for the funeral, the undertaker sent word that the hospital had erred, that another Anderson-named child had died, not Melvin. Mrs. Anderson fainted again...