How I Became Hettie Jones

by Hettie Jones

Overview

Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a haven'to which young poets, painters, and jazz musicians flocked. Among them was Hettie Cohen, who'd been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who'd chosen to cross racial barriers to marry the controversial black poet LeRoi Jones. Theirs was a bohemian life in the awakening East Village of underground publishing and jazz lofts, through which drifted such icons of the generation as Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, and Franz Kline.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802134967
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	12/06/1996
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Editorial Reviews

As the wife of controversial black playwright-poet LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Hettie Cohen, a white Jew from Queens, N.Y., plunged into the Greenwich Village bohemia of jazz, poetry, leftish politics and underground publishing in the late 1950s. Their life together ended in 1965, partly, she implies, because of separatist pressures on blacks to end their interracial marriages. In this restrained autobiographical mix of introspection and gossip, the author writes of coping with racial prejudice and violence, raising two daughters, and of living in the shadow of her husband. When the couple divorced, she became a children's book author and poet. The memoir is dotted with glimpses of Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, Franz Kline, among others. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Like Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters ( LJ 1/15/83), this memoir tells the story of an aimless young woman drawn into the orbit of the male-centered Beat Generation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It focuses on her marriage to LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and her struggle to raise a family, support her husband's art, and realize her own ambitions. Attempts at self-realization are complicated by the prejudice she encounters because of her interracial marriage, a marriage that fails to sustain itself when threatened by the racism and sexism of the times. Nevertheless, Jones celebrates the new bohemia of those days that nurtured innovative art, music, and poetry and served as a gathering place for the likes of Franz Kline, Diane DiPrima, and Allen Ginsberg.-- William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY

Library Journal