And like any good political writer, even tackling the broadest themes, her work remained human-scaled.

(Her father George Sarton was an esteemed philosopher of science her mother Mabel was ostensibly a stay at home mother though she was also a talented and successful designer in many areas, despite being thwarted by what Sarton saw as George Sarton’s ambitions and needs.)Īlthough it’s unclear if Sarton would have called herself a political writer, her work doesn't shy away from writing about issues related to feminism, racism, sexuality, and poverty in either her fiction or autobiographical work. In this journal and the ones that followed, Sarton wrestled in real time, so to speak, with what it meant to bring her full self to the job of being a writer, including her sexuality, the ebb and flow of a lifelong depression often expressed as rage, the sometimes prickly relationship she had with critics and with other writers, the competing needs for solitude and for society, and the legacy imprinted on her by her parents.

She also published 13 books of non-fiction, including several public journals, starting with 1973’s J ournal of a Solitude. Over the course of a decades-long career, Sarton published 17 books of poetry and 20 novels, along with a play and two books for children. She had originally left home (Cambridge, Massachusetts) to work with noted actress Eva de Galienne, but after a few significant setbacks, including the dissolution of first Galienne’s and then later Sarton’s own theater companies, the young Belgian-born writer turned to writing. May Sarton, a 1967 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, had planned to be an actress.

May sarton journals