Trinity of Passion by Wald Alan M.;

Author:Wald, Alan M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2007-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

Four years later, this perpetual adolescent who never grew taller than four feet, eight inches, was propelled to national fame when she published, under her new name, Lauren Gilfillan, the sensational best seller I Went to Pit College with the imprint of the Viking Press.

The book ostensibly was a nonfiction narrative in which a college graduate travels to the scene of the Great Coal Strike of 1931 in the coal town of Avella, Pennsylvania, thirty miles from Pittsburgh. “Pit College” is the ironic term that local miners use to refer to the mines, an allusion to the University of Pittsburgh, called Pitt for short, where the children of the wealthy went to college at that time. The protagonist, Laurie, disguises herself as a child, a boy, and a male coal miner, to gather information for a book during five weeks lived at a high-pitched intensity. The Pit College adventure includes hunger, violence, birth, death, romance, jealousy, and a sensational political trial—all the elements of a romantic or melodramatic novel. I Went to Pit College, however, was marketed as a mix of autobiography and reportage. Indeed, the very busy cover of the first edition features on the spine a photograph of the author in cap and gown at her graduation from Smith College; on the front jacket of the book are seven documentary pictures, one showing the author dressed in miner’s overalls beside a real miner and the others depicting various scenes of demonstrations, military occupation, shacks, and so on.

Selected as the Literary Guild Book for March 1934, I Went to Pit College was guaranteed an initial sale of 50,000 copies. But that scarcely accounts for the national sensation it created. There were more than seventy-five reviews; most were wildly enthusiastic, and some appeared on the front page of book review sections. Across the country there were announcements of meetings at public libraries and of small-town literary clubs where discussions of I Went to Pit College were to be held, usually preceded by a presentation on the book by a local woman. Gilfillan was the subject of dozens of news articles in which a standard biography recounted her upbringing in a family of social workers who lived in the Washington, D.C., slums at the time of her birth; the family’s subsequent move to the Midwest and Kalamazoo; Gilfillan’s dismay at finding herself unemployable after graduation from Smith College in the depths of the Depression; and finally, her acceptance of the “dare” of a publisher, George Palmer Putnam (husband of the aviator Amelia Earhart), to relocate to a coal mining town in order to immerse herself in an “experience” that would become the basis for a successful first book.14

Invariably as well, the authors of these interviews—usually male—would dwell on Gilfillan’s gender and physique to emphasize the contrast between her apparent female frailty and the horrors allegedly experienced by this “small Irish girl from Smith College” on her journey from middle-class security to the heart of darkness amidst western Pennsylvania’s coalfields. Typical was

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