This is Why I Wrote the Book
While I was studying at Juilliard, I was hungry for biographies on successful musicians and composers. Unfortunately, while pursuing my master's degree, I did not read one biography about a woman. In my spare time I would read the diaries of Anaïs Nin, the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, the Letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, or the enhanced autobiographies by Maya Angelou, but these books were not needed for my research during the pursuit of my degree. To make matters worse, I did not find one biography written on the life of an African American woman. I knew that an autobiography existed on contralto Marian Anderson's life called My Lord, What a Morning , and I have just found a copy online as I write this. Just last year I found a biography on the life of Clara Schumann ( née Wieck). I wish I could have read this biography while I was a student. Clara Schumann's experiences as a daughter of an overbearing patriarch, t...