Mary Jessamyn West (July 18, 1902 — February 23, 1984) was an American Quaker (originally from Indiana) who wrote numerous stories and novels, notably
The Friendly Persuasion (1945).
West went to Whittier College in the 1920s. There she helped found the Palmer Society, in 1921.
Much of her work concerns Indiana Quakers. Although she was born in Vernon, Indiana she left the state at the age of six when her family moved to California. Asked about this in an interview, she said, "I write about Indiana because knowing little about it, I can create it." Comparing herself to other authors that created fictional universes, she remarked:
- "Roth wrote The Breast. Would you ask him how he could do this since he had never been a breast? Adams wrote Watership Down. Would you ask him how he could do this since he admitted his rabbit knowledge came from a book about rabbits? ... And those hobbits!... I am a bigger risk-taker than these others. The Hoosiers can contradict me. No rabbit, hobbit, or breast has been known to speak up in reply to their exploiters."
When
The Friendly Persuasion was published,
New York Times book reviewer Orville Prescott called it "as fresh and engaging, tender and touching a book as ever was called sentimental by callous wretches... There have been plenty of louder and more insistent books this year, but few as sure and mellow as
The Friendly Persuasion."
The novel was adapted into the 1956 movie
Friendly Persuasion, starring Gary Cooper and directed by William Wyler. It was nominated for an Academy Award as "best picture." Her experiences as the movie's script writer are described in her autobiographical book
To See the Dream.West lived her last two decades in Napa Valley California, and died from a stroke at the age of 81.
In 2002 the city of Indianapolis selected
The Friendly Persuasion as the One Book, One City project for the year.
Except for Me and Thee, the sequel to
The Friendly Persuasion, was adapted into a 1975 television movie, titled
Friendly Persuasion, starring Richard Kiley.
West was a second cousin of Richard Nixon. Growing up in the same rural Yorba Linda region as Nixon, West attended a Sunday-school class taught by Nixon's father, Frank, whom she described as "a fiery persuasive teacher." She later wrote that Frank Nixon's version of the social gospel inclined her politically toward socialism
"A big iron needle stitching the country together.""A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.""A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.""A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.""A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.""Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.""Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.""Groan and forget it.""I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.""If you train people properly, they won't be able to tell a drill from the real thing. If anything, the real thing will be easier.""If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.""In my time and neighborhood (and in my soul) there was only one standard by which a woman measured success: did some man want her?""In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.""It is very east to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.""Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.""Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.""Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave.""Only a fool would refuse to enter a fool's paradise when that's the only paradise he'll ever have a chance to enter.""Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.""Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.""Teaching is the royal road to learning.""The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.""The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate.""The source of one's joy is also often the source of one's sorrow.""The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.""There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive.""We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?""We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.""Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.""You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it."