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Kathryn Hulme

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Kathryn Hulme
Born Kathryn Cavarly Hulme
July 6, 1900
San Francisco, California
Died August 25, 1981 (aged 81)
Lihue, Kauai, Hawaii
Spouse Leonard D. Geldert (1925–1928)

Kathryn Cavarly Hulme (January 6, 1900 – August 25, 1981) was an American novelist and memoirist.

Writing

Hulme is known for her best-selling 1956 novel The Nun's Story, which was adapted into an award-winning 1959 film directed by Fred Zinneman and starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter Finch. The novel is commonly misunderstood to be semi-autobiographical.

Hulme is also the author of the 1953 memoir The Wild Place, a vivid description of her experiences as the UNRRA Director of the Polish Displaced Persons camp at Wildflecken, Germany, after World War II. This work won the Atlantic Non-Fiction Award in 1952.[1]

It was at Wildflecken that Hulme met a Belgian nurse and former nun Marie Louise Habets, who became her lifelong companion. The Nun's Story is a slightly fictionalized biographical account of Habets' life as a nun.

Another work, the 1967 memoir The Undiscovered Country: A Spiritual Adventure, was a description of her years as a student of mystic G. I. Gurdjieff and her eventual conversion to Catholicism. Hulme studied with Gurdjieff as part of a group of eight women known as "The Rope," which included: Solita Solano, Kathryn Hulme, Alice Rohrer, Elizabeth Gordon, Louise Davidson, Georgette Leblanc, Margaret Caroline Anderson and Jane Heap.[2] In her 1938 fictionalized autobiography We Lived as Children, Hulme describes a child's perspective of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.

See also

References

  1. Back to citation Campbell, Debra (Winter 2008). "[About the Cover]: The Nun's Story: Another Look at the Postwar Religious Revival". American Catholic Studies. 119 (4): 103–108. JSTOR 44195197. Retrieved 10 February 2023.
  2. Back to citation The Rope Archived 2006-06-16 at the Wayback Machine gurdjieff-legacy.org.

Bibliography

  • Arab Interlude, Macrae Smith Company (Philadelphia), 1930
  • Desert Night, The Macauley Company (New York), 1932
  • We lived as children, A.A. Knopf (New York, London), 1938 (LCCN: 38027542, ASIN: B000GBZZIU)
  • The Wild Place, (Atlantic Prize for Nonfiction (1952), Brown Little, 1953, (ISBN 9787100102407)
  • The Nun's Story, Pocket Books, 1958 (ASIN: B000CBFXYA)
  • The Undiscovered Country: A Spiritual Adventure, Little, Brown & Co. (Boston USA/Toronto CA), 1967; reprinted (Natural Bridge Editions: Lexington MA, 1997) (ISBN 1-891218-03-4)
  • Look a Lion in the Eye: On Safari Through Africa, Little, Brown & Co. First edition (1974) (ISBN 0316381403)
  • Annie's Captain, Little, Brown and Company (Boston, Toronto), 1961