What Clouds There Were Were White: Journals of a Brooklyn Girl, 1929-1930

If America had a heart, one might call it Brooklyn. This story is a small piece of that heart, told with verve by a young girl who dreams of becoming a writer. In these pages, she records her travel from fourteen through "sweet sixteen" (1929-1930), mixing the routines of her neighborhood life in Flatbush with poems, radio song lyrics, her love of books, regular trips to the theater to watch the latest "pictures," illustrations of her Jazz Age clothes, and her romantic notions about boys. Here, at the beginning of the Depression, she reluctantly shortens her education to learn marketable skills at a business school—typing, shorthand, letter-writing—and finds her first job in Manhattan at a fan manufacturing firm for $15/week. Though the novel she is co-writing with her girl friend is ultimately burned in the winter woods, this, the truer, fuller story, survives. It is, at heart, a coming-of-ages narrative. Posthumously published, this book finally fulfills her girlhood dream.