Confession of Dorothy Danner Telling a Life

In this complex and fascinating book, Dorothy Danner of Mobile, Alabama, emerges as an intriguing example of one womans iconoclastic actions against mid-century Southern mores and prejudices. Born into a wealthy and well-established family, she bears and reflects many of the marks of her gender, social place, and historical moment. Struggling through adolescence, after her mothers early death, with what she perceived as emotional abandonment by a distant father, Danner acted out a social script involving servants and private schools in the South, an elite Northern college, and extensive travel abroad. She departed, however, from her expected role by engaging in psychoanalysis, explorations of sexual identity, too much liquor and some experimentation with drugs, as well as multiple marriages, one of which ended in the somewhat mysterious suicide of her first husband. She through herself wholeheartedly into idealistic and controversial causes including world peace, animal rights and the Civil Rights movement. In reconstructing this story of a complex and often frustrated woman, Richard Pride combines careful scholarship, extensive oral interviews, and current critical theory on understanding and effectively conveying the meaning of a human life. The Confession Of Dorothy Danner is a superlative example of the biographers art.Pride, Richard A. is the author of 'Confession of Dorothy Danner Telling a Life', published 1995 under ISBN 9780826512703 and ISBN 0826512704.