Amy Hill Hearth: Difference between revisions

American journalist and author

Amy Hill Hearth (pronounced “Harth”,^[1] born 1958)^[2] is an American journalist and author who focuses on uniquely American stories and perspectives from the past. She is the author or co-author of eleven books,^[3] beginning in 1993 with the oral history Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years, a New York Times bestseller for 117 weeks, according to its archives.^[4] The book was adapted for Broadway in 1995 and for a film in 1999.^[1]

An unusually versatile author, Hearth has published both fiction and nonfiction, and books for adults as well as children. What her books all have in common is a fascination with American history. “Wherever Amy Hill Hearth turns her attention, history comes alive,” author Peter Golden has said of Hearth.^[5]

Departing from her non-fiction work, Hearth wrote her first novel, Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women’s Literary Society, in 2011.^[6] It was published on October 2, 2012,^[7] followed by a sequel, Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County, published September 8, 2015.^[8]

Hearth’s tenth book, published January 2, 2018, is Streetcar to Justice: How Elizabeth Jennings Won the Right to Ride in New York. Written for middle-grade to adult readers, and published by HarperCollins/Greenwillow Books, the book is the first biography of civil rights pioneer Elizabeth Jennings Graham.^[9]

Hearth’s most recent work is her first historical thriller, Silent Came the Monster: A Novel of the 1916 Jersey Shore Shark Attacks, published May 16, 2023.^[10]

Life and career[edit]

Amy Hill Hearth was born in Pittsfield, Mass., on April 10, 1958. Her family relocated several times during her childhood. She spent her formative years in Columbia, South Carolina, and her young adult years in Florida. She has lived, also, in Niskayuna, Hartsdale, and Ossining, N.Y.^[1]

She is a thirteenth-generation American whose ancestors fought for independence in the Revolutionary War. She has some Native American (Lenni-Lenape) ancestry as well, and was given the Native name “Smiling Songbird Woman” by the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Indians in a tribal ceremony in 2010 in honor of her oral history about their tribal matriarch, Strong Medicine Speaks: A Native American Elder Has Her Say.^[1]

She attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, majoring in Sociology, then transferred to the University of Tampa, Florida editing the college newspaper and earning a B.A. in Writing. Her first newspaper job was assistant arts and entertainment editor at The Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and her first full-time reporting job was at the Daytona Beach News-Journal in Florida. She met her future husband, a native of Naples, Florida, when she interviewed him for a story. Hearth relocated to the New York area, and subsequently wrote eighty-eight bylined news and feature stories for The New York Times. This included her article on the Delany Sisters, “Two Maiden Ladies with Stories to Tell”.^[1]

Hearth is a college lecturer. In January 2012, for example, she was a visiting author at the University of Tampa, her alma mater.^[11] She and author Michael Connelly appeared together at what was billed by the university as its “Official Opening Reading” of the university’s newly launched Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program.^[11]

She and her husband have lived in New Jersey since 1996.^[1]

Having Our Say[edit]

Among Hearth’s New York Times stories was a September 22, 1991, feature on a then-unknown pair of centenarian sisters, Sadie Delany and Bessie Delany, with the headline, “Two ‘Maiden Ladies’ With Century-Old Stories to Tell”.^[12]

In an interview in the October–November 2007 issue of Book Women magazine, Hearth said that her interest in telling people’s stories was the reason she tracked down the reclusive Delany sisters and asked for an interview. When she finally met them, they were reluctant to be interviewed. In a New York Times story published on April 2, 1995, she recalled:

They didn’t think they were important enough. I had to convince them and gave this little impromptu speech – that I thought it was very important that people from their generation be represented, especially black women who hadn’t had much opportunity. I guess my enthusiasm rubbed off.^[1]

Following the article’s publication, Hearth was asked by Kodansha America, a book publisher, to expand it into a full-length biography. She decided, instead, to create an oral history and worked with the Delany sisters for almost two years to gather material for the book.
The book was published in 1993.^[13] It became a New York Times Bestseller for 117 weeks and was also on the bestseller lists of The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today and Publishers Weekly.^[1]

Reflecting on her early career as a journalist, she said: “I did the hard stuff. I’ve been in a police car going 130 miles per hour chasing someone…but I always loved finding a…