Sunday, May 11, 2014

Guess Whose Hair I'm Wearing

By Hildegarde Dolson

A collection of humorous short stories about the author's life in New York City, for the most part.

Most of these stories date from the 1950s and the book was published in the early 1960s, some fifty years ago. Some of the stories are quite amusing and enjoyable and some I just didn't get the joke. That's my fault, not the author's. But the ones that I did understand were pretty funny and I'm glad I finally got around to reading this book, which I have had for ten years or more. In fact, after finishing it, I decided to see if I could find another collection of her short stories, I Shook the Family Tree,  which is about her childhood and her early years in NYC in the 1930s.
Dolson was born in 1908 and always knew she wanted to be a writer.  She decided early on that she never wanted to get married or raise a family, preferring to concentrate on her career. One of her short stories in this collection is, "Why I'd Make an Awful Wife." Her view of herself was as a spinster but she later married a fellow writer when she was in her 50s. She had a very successful writing career, writing short stories and books of nonficition, fiction and mysteries. Many of her stories were published in The New Yorker magazine.

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