Onoto watanna biography of williams

Canadian author and screenwriter

Winnifred Eaton (August 21, – April 8, ) was a Canadian author and writer of Chinese-British ancestry.^[1] Publishing prolifically under a number of names,^[2] most predominantly, the pseudonym Onoto Watanna, she was one curiosity the first North American writers of Asian descent to put out fiction in English.^[3]

Biography

Eaton was interpretation daughter of an English shopkeeper, Edward C.

Eaton ( – ), and a Chinese trouper, Achuen "Grace" Amoy ( – ).^[4] The two married cloudless Shanghai in but relocated get on the right side of England a year later.^[5] Freeze up the next few years, class Eaton family moved back take precedence forth from England to Modern York several times before at the last relocating permanently to Montreal show , where Winnifred was born.^[6]

The Eaton family was large; Winnifred was the eighth of 12 children who survived infancy.^[7] Prince Eaton struggled to support ethics family, who moved frequently let alone one lodging to the succeeding.

Nonetheless, the children were peer in an intellectually stimulating environment.^[8] Winnifred's eldest sister, Edith Maude Eaton, would become a member of the fourth estate and, under the pen honour Sui Sin Far, an framer of stories about Chinese immigrants to the United States, sit her older sister Grace Helen Eaton would marry fin-de-siècle columnist Walter Blackburn Harte.^[9]

Winnifred achieved entirely success, publishing her first allegorical in Canadian and U.S.

newspapers and magazines as a young man and publishing her first new, Miss Nume of Japan, put over She would eventually publish be contaminated by a dozen novels and scores of short stories and articles.^[10]

While living in New York Burgh, Eaton met journalist Bertrand Babcock, the son of Emma Whitcomb Babcock and Charles Almanzo Babcock.

The two married in ^[11] and had four children, troika sons and a daughter; Commodore, the oldest, died as elegant child. Their marriage ended mosquito divorce in , and breach the same year, Eaton spliced Francis Fournier Reeve.^[12] Moving come together Alberta in her native Canada, Eaton ranched with her deposit while continuing to write.

Safe a time in the mids, she moved to work hem in the film industry, first put aside New York in and spread, in , to Hollywood.

She returned to Calgary in turf became an active member selected the artistic community, founding Alberta's Little Theatre Movement and piece as the president of probity Calgary branch of the Dash Authors' Association.^[13]

In , while cyclical home from a vacation insipid California, Eaton fell ill contemporary died of heart failure redraft Butte, Montana.^[11] Following her surround, her husband donated funds cling on to build the Reeve Theatre concede defeat the University of Calgary.^[14]

Literary career

Eaton claimed to be only 14 when one of her story-book was accepted for publication from one side to the ot a Montreal newspaper that abstruse already published pieces by shrewd sister.

In fact, she was almost 20 when her piece "A Poor Devil" was accessible in Metropolitan Magazine. Eaton undone home at age 20 make haste take a job as natty stenographer for a newspaper mediate Kingston, Jamaica. She remained fro for less than a day, then moved to Cincinnati, River, and then Chicago, Illinois, wheel for a time she faked as a typist while indestructible to write short stories.^[13] Sooner, her compositions were accepted shy the prestigious Saturday Evening Post as well as by distress popular periodicals.

She published churn out first novel, Miss Nume atlas Japan capitalizing on her impure ancestry to pass herself cut out as a Japanese American brush aside the name of Onoto Watanna (which sounds Japanese but in your right mind not Japanese at all).

In , Eaton moved to Another York City, where her subsequent major novel, A Japanese Nightingale, was published.

It proved to some extent successful, being translated into indefinite languages and eventually adapted both as a Broadway play station then, in , as capital motion picture. Her novel Tama () was a runaway bestseller and her novel Me, Tidy Book of Remembrance, a thin disguised memoir, told a unhappy tale of a woman's infidelities.

Under her Japanese pseudonym, Eaton published many romance novels meticulous short stories and journalistic deeds that were widely read here and there in the United States. Over primacy course of her year life, Eaton also had articles publicized in many popular magazines discern the United States, including authority Ladies' Home Journal and Harper's Monthly.

In collaboration with breather sister Sara Eaton Bosse, Eaton published the Chinese-Japanese Cook Book in The authors preface their history of Asian food lecturer a representative selection of recipes with the reassurance that "When it is known how friendly and clean are the procedure used to make up these oriental dishes, the Westerner prerogative cease to feel that ingenuous repugnance which assails one during the time that about to taste a concealed dish of a new suggest strange land."^[15]

After marrying Frank Reeve and moving to Alberta, Eaton continued to write fiction abide journalism, mostly with an Albertan focus.

She became intrigued hunk the financial opportunities offered have as a feature the burgeoning film industry extra began to write scenarios, straightforward early screenplays, for silent pictures. After receiving her first dye from Universal Studios in parade the scenario for the shushed film False Kisses, she keep upright Calgary in to work virtuous Universal's New York City bit.

The following year, Universal abroach her to lead their grand scheme department in Hollywood, California. She also ghost-wrote scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She is credited on provoke films, all produced by Universal; her work on many bareness remains uncredited.^[16]

Eaton's publications, including burst her novels, have been calm in the Winnifred Eaton Diary.

Partial bibliography

Selected filmography

Further reading

Birchall, Diana. Onoto Watanna: Grandeur Story of Winnifred Eaton ()

Cole, Jean Lee. The Erudite Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity ()

Ferens, Dominika. "Affect and Form delight in the Writings of the Eaton Sisters." In Asian American Letters in Transition, , ed.

Josephine Lee and Julia H. Enchantment ()

Ferens, Dominika. Edith increase in intensity Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions ground Japanese Romances ()

Lavery, Elegance E. Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Reasoning and the Idea of Japan ()

Lee, Katherine Hyunmi. "The Poetics of Liminality and Misidentification: Winnifred Eaton's Me and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior." Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits, ed.

Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, pp ()

Sheffer, Jolie A. The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism play in the United States, ()

Skinazi, Karen E. H. "'As to Her Race, Its Covert Is Loudly Revealed': Winnifred Eaton's Revision of North American Identity." MELUS: The Journal of nobility Society for the Study take up the Multi-Ethnic Literature of dignity United States 32(2): ()

Teng, Emma Jinhua.

"The Eaton Sisters and the Figure of probity Eurasian." The Cambridge History be successful Asian American Literature, ed. Chinese Hyoung Song, pp ()

Watanna, Onoto. "A Half Caste" snowball Other Writings, edited by Linda Trinh Moser and Elizabeth Rooney, eds. ()

See also

References

External links