In Nebraska at fourteen Willa Cather began dressing as a boy and calling herself William, which continued at least four years, into her studies at the state university. So when she could choose a fictional world to live in, she tended to write about male characters. Although known for her paeans to life in the Midwest, like O Pioneers! and My Antonia, she spent her entire adult life in New York City, where for more than 35 years she lived with her partner Edith Lewis. Although Nebraska is often a starting point, her twelve novels cover an incredible range. Song of the Lark
is about an opera singer who travels internationally. One of Ours (for which she won the Pulitzer Prize) features a man enlisting to fight in World War I after his wife leaves to do missionary work in China. Death Comes for the Archbishop takes place in New Mexico Territory and is her masterpiece, according to many critics, although A.S. Byatt, Bob Smith, and Peter Cameron prefer The Professor's House.
During four decades of The New Yorker's glory years, the magazine published 150 short stories by the English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, yet, as John Updike says, her work "never quite won her the flaming place in the heavens of repute that she deserved." Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1925), concerns a middle-aged woman who is not interested in men and becomes a witch instead. Her second novel, Mr. Fortune's Maggot (1927), concerns a middle-aged gay clergyman who while doing missionary work in the South Seas falls in love with a native young man and loses his faith. Lolly Willowes was the very first selection of the Book of the Month Club, and both novels were major successes in America and the United Kingdom. More novels, collections of stories, poems, and a biography of T.H. White followed, though at a slower pace and to smaller sales. Much has been made of her close, literary friendship with her New Yorker editor and author of the classic gay novel The Folded Leaf, William Maxwell, immortalized in a collection of their letters from 1938 to 1978. Less discussed is her greatest love, her partner of thirty-nine years, the poet Valentine Ackland. Although the two women died nine years apart, their ashes are buried together beneath a single stone in a churchyard in Chaldon Herring, Dorset.
The straight, white gods of rock were all copying the same gay, black pioneer, Little Richard.
Elvis: "Your music has inspired me - you are the greatest."
The Beatles: "He was my idol at school. The first song I ever sang in public was Long Tall Sally, at a Butlins holiday camp talent competition! I love his voice and I always wanted to sing like him." "It was all his fault really."
The Rolling Stones: "Little Richard is the originator and my first idol." "Little Richard is King."
Bob Dylan: in his high school yearbook says his goal is "to join Little Richard."
David Bowie (not so straight): "After hearing Little Richard on record, I bought a saxophone and came into the music business. Little Richard was my inspiration."
Paul Simon: "When I was in high school I wanted to be like Little Richard."
Bob Seeger: "Little Richard - he was the first one that really got to me... I always preferred a high energy vocal, a hard full-force vocal. I liked Little Richard better than Elvis."
Pat Boone: "No one person has been imitated more than Little Richard."
Black superstars, too, are quick to credit Little Richard, although in following him they never reaped the same rewards as their white counterparts.
James Brown (who claimed that Little Richard was the first to put the funk in the rock beat): "Little Richard is my idol."
Otis Redding: "If it hadn't been for Little Richard, I would not be here. I entered the music business because of Richard - he is my inspiration. I used to sing like Little Richard, his Rock 'n' Roll stuff, you know. Richard has soul, too. My present music has a lot of him in it."
Sam Cooke: "I love Little Richard. He is a great entertainer and he has done so much for our music."
Smokey Robinson: "Little Richard was the beginning of that drivin', never-let-up, funky Rock 'n' Roll."
Ray Charles: Little Richard "started a kind of music that set the pace for a lot of what's happening today."
Rev. Al Green: "I was a little kid when I heard Little Richard. He was playing piano and singing that song [Jenny, Jenny]. Even then, I knew he was a classic, one-of-a-kind. I never heard (a performer) with that kind of enthusiasm."
Jimi Hendrix: "I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice."
What makes his lasting importance astounding is that it's all based on two years' work. He released Tutti Frutti in November 1955, and in 1957, while touring Australia, he became born again and quit the music business. His success and influence are even more surprising when you consider how, in the middle of the Eisenhower administration (the summer of '56 when Ike added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance and authorized the national motto of "In God We Trust"), Little Richard made the world fall for a high camp, effeminate black man in flashy clothes, crazy hair, wearing heavy pancake makeup and heavier eyeliner. (He based much of his style on another Southern gay black man, Esquerita.) Given the times, none of this should have happened for Richard Penniman. Given his own background, with his parents disowning him at thirteen for being gay, it ought to have been impossible.
Starting in the 1960s, he staged many comebacks, easily slipping into caricature and never equaling his early highs: After Tutti Frutti came Long Tall Sally, Slipin and Slidin, Rip It Up, Lucille, Jenny, Jenny, Keep a Knockin, and Good Golly, Miss Molly. Beyond the music, he has kept the persona relevant for fifty years. Witness his turn with King Ralph and his recent ads for Geico. Today he is 79 and lives in Lynchburg, TN. He is still single.