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Ella Moon
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, one of the Victorian world's most popular poets, penned the famous "Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone." Born on an impoverished Wisconsin farm, Ella Wheeler Wilcox hungered for fame and fortune. As a young farm girl, she caught the attention of East Coast editors. Her life became a tapestry of color and melodrama, an epic of American rags to riches. She scandalized her generation with verse that seemed too risqué for a puritanical nation, but her own married life was the model of Christian propriety. This fictionalized account chronicles her controversial life, not only the glittering heights of international celebrity, but also the nagging fears that tempered her vast and cherished success. Other notable works by Wilcox were a poem marking the death of Queen Victoria and a plea to World War I American soldiers fighting in Europe to "come back clean, boys" to their wives and families and avoid venereal disease.
370 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
8 people want to read
About the author
Ed Ifkovic
41 books16 followersAKA Edward Ifkovic
Ed Ifkovic taught literature and creative writing at a community college in Connecticut for over three decades, and now, retired, devotes himself to writing fiction. His short stories and essays have appeared in such diverse periodicals as the Village Voice, America, Hartford Monthly, and the Journal of Popular Culture. He’s published fiction with small presses, including a novel based on the life of Victorian poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. A longtime devotee of mystery novels, he fondly recalls his boyhood discovery of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason series in a family bookcase, and his immediate obsession with the whodunit world. When he was fourteen, bored on a lazy summer afternoon, his mother handed him a copy of Edna Ferber’s Cimarron—for him, a riveting Western about the settling of Oklahoma and the discovery of oil—and he stayed up until three in the morning, until, bleary-eyed, he finished the novel.
Ed Ifkovic taught literature and creative writing at a community college in Connecticut for over three decades, and now, retired, devotes himself to writing fiction. His short stories and essays have appeared in such diverse periodicals as the Village Voice, America, Hartford Monthly, and the Journal of Popular Culture. He’s published fiction with small presses, including a novel based on the life of Victorian poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. A longtime devotee of mystery novels, he fondly recalls his boyhood discovery of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason series in a family bookcase, and his immediate obsession with the whodunit world. When he was fourteen, bored on a lazy summer afternoon, his mother handed him a copy of Edna Ferber’s Cimarron—for him, a riveting Western about the settling of Oklahoma and the discovery of oil—and he stayed up until three in the morning, until, bleary-eyed, he finished the novel.
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July 8, 2009
I liked this book in the beginning. I thought that surely she was so self absorbed because she was a child. However, she never really changed, even as she aged. I wanted to poke my eyes out with my own fingers. I could not relate to her at all. She was a self absorbed, recognition crazy narcisist. I forced myself to read and discovered once again that life is too short to force yourself to read something you can't stand. I was truely bummed because I had always liked her poems, then to find out that she was like this was horrible. I know this was a novel, but it included enough of her own poems and journals to get the just of the real person.
Displaying 1 of 1 review