Katya Alpert Gilden

Katya Alpert Gilden (March 9, 1914 – May 5, 1991)[1] was a best-selling novelist who wrote with her husband Bert Gilden under the pen-name "K.B. Gilden". The couple produced two major novels, Hurry Sundown (1964), which was made into an Otto Preminger film in 1967, and Between the Hills and the Sea (1971), published the year of Bert's death.

Gilden was born in Bangor, Maine and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1935. While an undergraduate, she was the first woman to publish in the Harvard Advocate, submitting a poem, and a story about a fight between a black and white boxer.[2] The themes of race, gender, and inequality would resurface in her later novels. Hurry Sundown is about black and white Southern sharecroppers, and Between the Hills and the Sea about factory workers and labor relations in the 1940s-50s. The Gildens considered themselves "novelist[s] of the world of work", and were heavily influenced by essays on proletarian fiction by György Lukács.[3]

Hurry Sundown was a best-seller, but was largely panned by critics. One criticism of the book was its extreme length (1.046 pages).[4] Time called it a "punch-card novel" because of its predictability,[5] and the Chicago Tribune called it "a novel lost in its own maze".[6] Nonetheless, the Gildens sold the movie rights to Paramount for an unprecedented $795,000.

Gilden lived the later part of her life in Cambridge, Massachusetts and died in Boston. She had three children.[7]

References

  1. ↑ KATYA GILDEN (1914-1991), Social Security Death Index
  2. ↑ Obit. Boston Globe, May 8, 1991
  3. ↑ Tim Libretti, "Beyond False Promises: K.B. Gilden's Between the Hills and the Sea and the Rethinking of Working Class Culture, Consciousness, and Activism" in Woman's Studies Quarterly: Working Class Lives and Cultures, v. 26, nos. 1 & 2 (Summer/Spring 1998), pp. 159-179
  4. ↑ New York Times, Jan. 8, 1965
  5. ↑ Time, "Punch-Card Novel", Jan. 8, 1965
  6. ↑ Chicago Tribune, A Novel Lost in its Own Maze", Jan. 10, 1965
  7. ↑ Obit. New York Times, May 8, 1991 New York Times Obituary
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