User:Hartley68/Fannie Hurst

Influence and legacy
Upon her death in 1968, Hurst left half of her estate to her alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis, and the other half to Brandeis University. The universities used the money to endow professorships in their respective English departments and to create "Hurst Lounges" for writers to share their work with academics and students.

At the time of her death, and for several decades thereafter, Hurst was treated as a popular culture writer, credited with having "set the style followed by Jacqueline Susann, Judith Krantz, and Jackie Collins" and considered "one of the great trash novelists". Her works fell into obscurity and largely went out of print. In the 1990s, Hurst's life and work again started to receive serious critical attention, including the formation of a Fannie Hurst Society for interested scholars; a volume of literary criticism by Abe C. Ravitz published in 1997; and a detailed biography of Hurst by Kroeger published in 1999.

In 2004, The Feminist Press published a collection of her stories from between the years 1912 and 1935, seeking to "propel a long overdue revival and reassessment of Hurst's work" and praising her "depth, intelligence, and artistry as a writer."

Other aspects of Hurst's life and work examined by scholars include her American Jewish background, her friendship with and patronage of Zora Neale Hurston (which Hurston discussed in her own autobiography), the treatment of racial issues in her novel Imitation of Life and the movies based upon it, and even her well-publicized dieting. She has also been called a pioneer in the field of public relations due to her development of her own strong public persona.