Wilma Dykeman (1920–2006)
Autor de The Tall Woman
Sobre El Autor
Obras de Wilma Dykeman
Obras relacionadas
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Nombre legal
- Dykeman Stokely, Wilma
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1920-05-20
- Fecha de fallecimiento
- 2006-12-22
- Género
- female
- Nacionalidad
- USA
- Lugar de nacimiento
- Beaverdam, North Carolina, USA
- Educación
- Biltmore Junior College (1938)
Northwestern University (Speech|1940) - Ocupaciones
- Author
- Organizaciones
- Fellowship of Southern Writers
- Premios y honores
- Phi Beta Kappa
Weatherford Award (Special, 1973)
Miembros
Reseñas
Premios
También Puede Gustarte
Autores relacionados
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 22
- También por
- 3
- Miembros
- 685
- Popularidad
- #36,934
- Valoración
- 3.9
- Reseñas
- 11
- ISBNs
- 35
The Tall Woman is the story of Lydia Moore, a girl born in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and raised in a hard-scrabble world that gets no easier when she becomes a woman and marries Mark McQueen. It is in the years following the Civil War, when the hurt and division has not been healed, that Lydia must find a way to live her life, raise her children, and bind her community together. Dykeman’s descriptions of the mountains and its people are so vivid and real that you close the book feeling you are losing a place you know and friends you can barely bear to leave.
There is a mountain stream that figures in Lydia’s life...a favorite place that she keeps clean and fresh and from which she draws her water. I cast back into my childhood to visits with my Great Uncle Naman, who lived in the North Georgia Mountains, part of the same ridge that crosses North Carolina. One of the things that stands out clearly is going to the church there to clean the graves of my great-grandparents and drinking from the stream that ran behind the churchyard. The water was the clearest, sweetest-tasting liquid that ever touched my lips. I knew Lydia’s stream.
There is a flavor of the mountains that comes from the genuine and easy way Dykeman has her characters speak. There is Aunt Tilda, whose “Eh, law, child” echoed the expressions of my own grandmother and aunts. And such wonderful expressions as “Could he but buy himself for what he's worth, and sell himself for what he thinks he's worth, he'd be princely rich overnight." I laughed aloud at that one and don’t think I will ever forget it.
Lydia’s life is hard, in every way that a life can be. She faces her personal trials with a wisdom and fortitude that is inspirational. She draws her strength from the very mountains she stands upon and from the faith and love she has inherited from her parents.
Sometimes it seemed to Lydia that work was the only certainty, the only lasting truth in a human world of fitful change. Work and the mountains remained. Joy was deceitful and as brief as a summer rainbow. Love was a spear upon which you hurled yourself in ecstasy--to discover pain and bear the wound forever
Even in the face of this, Lydia never gives up. Her progression from girl to wife to mother is gratifying to behold. I loved her, along with every other character with which Dykeman peopled her world. How, oh how, do these kinds of wonderfully written books fade in obscurity? Why is Wilma Dykeman’s name not listed on all these “before you die” lists? I am so happy to have read her at last and hope someone else will pick up this book because of this review and then pass the word on.
My particular thanks to Laura at the Southern Literary Trail who has told me time and again that I didn’t know what I was missing.… (más)