Mary Antin

A New York Times bestseller, the groundbreaking authoritative history of the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. A definitive book on American history, The Promised Land is also essential reading for educators and policymakers at both national and local levels.

A vivid, idealistic and inspiring autobiography of an emotional Russian child who came as an immigrant to the Boston slums and used all the opportunities possible in “the promised land.” — A.L.A. Catalog 1912-1921 “Autobiography of an immigrant who was born less than thirty years ago (1912) in Polotzk, Russia, a town in the Jewish pale, and spent her childhood there. Her family being driven by the pressure of poverty to immigrate, when she was twelve years old she was brought to America, where she made a brilliant progress thru the public schools of Boston and thru Barnard college. The story of her life is absorbing in its human significance, remarkable for its literary distinction and convincingly hopeful in its view of the immigrant problem in America.” – Standard Catalog for Public Libraries: Biography Section (1927)

"Best known as an immigrant autobiographer - primarily for the much-celebrated Promised Land (1912) and From Plotzk to Boston - Mary Antin (1881-1949) wrote regularly for the Atlantic Monthly and played an influential role in the Boston and New York Jewish literary communities, as well as national political campaigns. With the publication of her letters, Evelyn Salz restores her to a prominent place in American literature.". "Throughout her life, Antin corresponded with a wide range of people from Israel Zangwill and Theodore Roosevelt to Zionists Horace Kallen and Bernard G. Richards, as well as writer and editor Louis Lipsky, industrialist Thomas A. Watson, and Rabbi Abraham Cronbach. This correspondence (1899-1949) follows Antin's life from a precocious adolescence through her years of fame and public involvement (after writing The Promised Land) and her slow descent into mental illness and eventual obscurity."--BOOK JACKET.

A vivid, idealistic and inspiring autobiography of an emotional Russian child who came as an immigrant to the Boston slums and used all the opportunities possible in “the promised land.” — A.L.A. Catalog 1912-1921 “Autobiography of an immigrant who was born less than thirty years ago (1912) in Polotzk, Russia, a town in the Jewish pale, and spent her childhood there. Her family being driven by the pressure of poverty to immigrate, when she was twelve years old she was brought to America, where she made a brilliant progress thru the public schools of Boston and thru Barnard college. The story of her life is absorbing in its human significance, remarkable for its literary distinction and convincingly hopeful in its view of the immigrant problem in America.” – Standard Catalog for Public Libraries: Biography Section (1927)