New York on $5 a Day: A Novelist's Memoir, 1963-64

New York on $5 a Day, the last book by the novelist Ardyth Kennelly (1912-2005), is a brief but charming account of her two-year sojourn in New York City (1963-64), where she had gone to try to revive her writing career after the death of her husband a year earlier. Written in 2001, the memoir is a chatty and engaging reminiscence about the unusual people she met in New York, including the English witch and writer Sybil Leek, whom Ardyth asked to cast a spell so she could be a successful writer again (and whose CBS TV appearance Ardyth inadvertently almost spoiled); the aged writer Anzia Yezierska, blind and nearly forgotten but still lively and demanding; the minor poet Sanders Russell, with whom Ardyth explored the city and the World's Fair; the blinded Spanish Civil War veteran Robert Raven, her landlord on West 16th Street; and Raymond Duncan, brother of the famed dancer Isadora Duncan.

Ardyth also writes perceptively and vividly about the city as she herself--a well-read but not terribly worldly woman from the West--experienced it. This sparkling center of literary life was a surprising and exciting place for a writer from a relatively unsophisticated town like Portland, Oregon. We learn from Ardyth's letters to her literary friend Freddy Jacobson (included in an appendix) that she reveled in the rich variety of readings, plays, movies, and sightings of famous people--and she loved that you could read the book reviews on Sunday and walk right into Brentano's on Monday and get the books, without having to wait two weeks while they were sent away for.

In New York Ardyth had an apartment in Greenwich Village, a tall and handsome Austrian beau, a "Beatle haircut" editor (John Pope), and a dream of living in the famous Dakota apartments. But late in 1964, having had no further success in publishing her books--and feeling that the "alien corn" had at last grown a little too high--she ended her New York idyll and took a bus home to Portland.

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New York on $5 a Day: A Novelist's Memoir, 1963-64

New York on $5 a Day, the last book by the novelist Ardyth Kennelly (1912-2005), is a brief but charming account of her two-year sojourn in New York City (1963-64), where she had gone to try to revive her writing career after the death of her husband a year earlier. Written in 2001, the memoir is a chatty and engaging reminiscence about the unusual people she met in New York, including the English witch and writer Sybil Leek, whom Ardyth asked to cast a spell so she could be a successful writer again (and whose CBS TV appearance Ardyth inadvertently almost spoiled); the aged writer Anzia Yezierska, blind and nearly forgotten but still lively and demanding; the minor poet Sanders Russell, with whom Ardyth explored the city and the World's Fair; the blinded Spanish Civil War veteran Robert Raven, her landlord on West 16th Street; and Raymond Duncan, brother of the famed dancer Isadora Duncan.

Ardyth also writes perceptively and vividly about the city as she herself--a well-read but not terribly worldly woman from the West--experienced it. This sparkling center of literary life was a surprising and exciting place for a writer from a relatively unsophisticated town like Portland, Oregon. We learn from Ardyth's letters to her literary friend Freddy Jacobson (included in an appendix) that she reveled in the rich variety of readings, plays, movies, and sightings of famous people--and she loved that you could read the book reviews on Sunday and walk right into Brentano's on Monday and get the books, without having to wait two weeks while they were sent away for.

In New York Ardyth had an apartment in Greenwich Village, a tall and handsome Austrian beau, a "Beatle haircut" editor (John Pope), and a dream of living in the famous Dakota apartments. But late in 1964, having had no further success in publishing her books--and feeling that the "alien corn" had at last grown a little too high--she ended her New York idyll and took a bus home to Portland.

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New York on $5 a Day: A Novelist's Memoir, 1963-64

New York on $5 a Day: A Novelist's Memoir, 1963-64

by Ardyth Kennelly
New York on $5 a Day: A Novelist's Memoir, 1963-64

New York on $5 a Day: A Novelist's Memoir, 1963-64

by Ardyth Kennelly

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Overview

New York on $5 a Day, the last book by the novelist Ardyth Kennelly (1912-2005), is a brief but charming account of her two-year sojourn in New York City (1963-64), where she had gone to try to revive her writing career after the death of her husband a year earlier. Written in 2001, the memoir is a chatty and engaging reminiscence about the unusual people she met in New York, including the English witch and writer Sybil Leek, whom Ardyth asked to cast a spell so she could be a successful writer again (and whose CBS TV appearance Ardyth inadvertently almost spoiled); the aged writer Anzia Yezierska, blind and nearly forgotten but still lively and demanding; the minor poet Sanders Russell, with whom Ardyth explored the city and the World's Fair; the blinded Spanish Civil War veteran Robert Raven, her landlord on West 16th Street; and Raymond Duncan, brother of the famed dancer Isadora Duncan.

Ardyth also writes perceptively and vividly about the city as she herself--a well-read but not terribly worldly woman from the West--experienced it. This sparkling center of literary life was a surprising and exciting place for a writer from a relatively unsophisticated town like Portland, Oregon. We learn from Ardyth's letters to her literary friend Freddy Jacobson (included in an appendix) that she reveled in the rich variety of readings, plays, movies, and sightings of famous people--and she loved that you could read the book reviews on Sunday and walk right into Brentano's on Monday and get the books, without having to wait two weeks while they were sent away for.

In New York Ardyth had an apartment in Greenwich Village, a tall and handsome Austrian beau, a "Beatle haircut" editor (John Pope), and a dream of living in the famous Dakota apartments. But late in 1964, having had no further success in publishing her books--and feeling that the "alien corn" had at last grown a little too high--she ended her New York idyll and took a bus home to Portland.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780990432043
Publisher: Sunnycroft Books
Publication date: 10/30/2024
Pages: 86
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.23(d)

About the Author

Ardyth Kennelly (1912-2005) was the author of five novels published between 1949 and 1956, including two best-sellers, and one published posthumously, in 2014. Ardyth's roots were in Salt Lake City, with an Irish Catholic father and a Swedish-Norwegian Mormon mother, but she was born in tiny Glenada, Oregon. She grew up in Salt Lake City and Albany, Oregon, attended Oregon State College in Corvallis (now Oregon State University), and lived most of the rest of her life in Portland. Ardyth began publishing poems and short stories at age 15 and gained national fame with her first novel, "The Peaceable Kingdom," based on the life of her maternal grandmother, a second wife in polygamy in late-nineteenth-century Utah. She married the Viennese émigré Egon V. Ullman, a physician, in 1940, sharing with him a lifelong love of books and literature. She also had a second career late in life as a collage and mixed-media artist, with her strikingly original pieces exhibited in Portland galleries.
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