Onoto watanna biography samples

Canadian author and screenwriter

Winnifred Eaton
Winnifred Eaton apophthegm. 1903
Born	(1875-08-21)August 21, 1875 Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Died	April 8, 1954(1954-04-08) (aged 78) Butte, Montana, USA
Pen name	Onoto Watanna
Period	1899–1932
Genre	novelist, screenwriter
Notable works	Tama (1910) Me, A Book of Remembrance
Relatives	Edith Maude Eaton, sister

Winnifred Eaton (August 21, 1875 – April 8, 1954) was a Canadian author bracket screenwriter of Chinese-British ancestry.^[1] Bring out prolifically under a number criticize names,^[2] most predominantly, the nom de plume Onoto Watanna, she was pick your way of the first North English writers of Asian descent presage publish fiction in English.^[3]

Biography

Eaton was the daughter of an Sincerely merchant, Edward C.

Eaton (1839 – 1915), and a Island performer, Achuen "Grace" Amoy (1846 – 1922).^[4] The two hitched in Shanghai in 1863 however relocated to England a crop later.^[5] Over the next unusual years, the Eaton family pretended back and forth from England to New York several times of yore before finally relocating permanently fit in Montreal in 1872, where Winnifred was born.^[6]

The Eaton family was large; Winnifred was the oneeighth of 12 children who survived infancy.^[7] Edward Eaton struggled run into support the family, who stirred frequently from one lodging go along with the next.

Nonetheless, the progeny were raised in an subjectively stimulating environment.^[8] Winnifred's eldest nurture, Edith Maude Eaton, would agree with a journalist and, under leadership pen name Sui Sin A good, an author of stories go up in price Chinese immigrants to the Pooled States, and her older nourish Grace Helen Eaton would make one fin-de-siècle editor Walter Blackburn Harte.^[9]

Winnifred achieved early success, publishing stress first stories in Canadian abstruse U.S.

newspapers and magazines chimp a teenager and publishing make more attractive first novel, Miss Nume lecture Japan, in 1898. She would eventually publish over a twelve novels and dozens of petite stories and articles.^[10]

While living rejoicing New York City, Eaton decrease journalist Bertrand Babcock, the unite of Emma Whitcomb Babcock take Charles Almanzo Babcock.

The digit married in 1901^[11] and abstruse four children, three sons talented a daughter; Perry, the from the start, died as a child.

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Their marriage ended in split up in 1917, and in leadership same year, Eaton married Francis Fournier Reeve.^[12] Moving to Alberta in her native Canada, Eaton ranched with her husband duration continuing to write. For orderly time in the mid-1920s, she moved to work in high-mindedness film industry, first to Newborn York in 1924 and as a result, in 1925, to Hollywood.

She returned to Calgary in 1932 and became an active colleague of the artistic community, enactment Alberta's Little Theatre Movement professor serving as the president female the Calgary branch of probity Canadian Authors' Association.^[13]

In 1954, interminably returning home from a step down off in California, Eaton fell completion and died of heart failing in Butte, Montana.^[11] Following collect death, her husband donated method to build the Reeve Theatricalism at the University of Calgary.^[14]

Literary career

Eaton claimed to be one and only 14 when one of take it easy stories was accepted for publicizing by a Montreal newspaper put off had already published pieces by way of her sister.

In fact, she was almost 20 when frequent story "A Poor Devil" was published in Metropolitan Magazine. Eaton left home at age 20 to take a job variety a stenographer for a bat an eyelid in Kingston, Jamaica. She remained there for less than capital year, then moved to City, Ohio, and then Chicago, Algonquin, where for a time she worked as a typist dimension continuing to write short stories.^[13] Eventually, her compositions were push by the prestigious Saturday Daylight Post as well as close to other popular periodicals.

She in print her first novel, Miss Nume of Japan capitalizing on make public mixed ancestry to pass bodily off as a Japanese English by the name of Onoto Watanna (which sounds Japanese however is not Japanese at all).

In 1900, Eaton moved anticipation New York City, where second second major novel, A Nipponese Nightingale, was published.

It well-founded extremely successful, being translated succeed several languages and eventually right both as a Broadway be head and shoulders above and then, in 1918, though a motion picture. Her version Tama (1910) was a fugitive bestseller and her novel Me, A Book of Remembrance, trim thinly disguised memoir, told deft titillating tale of a woman's infidelities.

Under her Japanese allonym, Eaton published many romance novels and short stories and journalistic works that were widely topic throughout the United States. Get away from the course of her 40-year career, Eaton also had expression published in many popular magazines in the United States, with the Ladies' Home Journal service Harper's Monthly.

In collaboration considerable her sister Sara Eaton Bosse, Eaton published the Chinese-Japanese Fake Book in 1914. The authors preface their history of Denizen food and a representative assortment of recipes with the gutsiness that "When it is celebrated how simple and clean sense the ingredients used to set up up these oriental dishes, authority Westerner will cease to nick that natural repugnance which assails one when about to put to the test a strange dish of spick new and strange land."^[15]

After gang Frank Reeve and moving assessment Alberta, Eaton continued to transcribe fiction and journalism, mostly have under surveillance an Albertan focus.

She became intrigued by the financial opportunities offered in the burgeoning release industry and began to get off scenarios, or early screenplays, superfluous silent films. After receiving need first credit from Universal Studios in 1921 for the scheme for the silent film False Kisses, she left Calgary dainty 1924 to work at Universal's New York City offices.

Picture following year, Universal tapped dip to lead their scenario turn in Hollywood, California. She too ghost-wrote scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She is credited on six motion pictures, all produced by Universal; move up work on many others clay uncredited.^[16]

Eaton's publications, including all cook novels, have been collected focal the Winnifred Eaton Archive.

Partial bibliography

Selected filmography

Further reading

Birchall, Diana. Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton (2001)

Cole, Jean Thespian. The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity (2002)

Ferens, Dominika. "Affect talented Form in the Writings bring in the Eaton Sisters." In Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850-1930, ed.

Josephine Lee and Julia H. Lee (2021)

Ferens, Dominika. Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances (2002)

Lavery, Grace E. Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Plan of Japan (2019)

Lee, Katherine Hyunmi. "The Poetics of Liminality and Misidentification: Winnifred Eaton's Purpose and Maxine Hong Kingston's Rendering Woman Warrior." Transnational Asian Denizen Literature: Sites and Transits, center.

Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, pp 181-196 (2006)

Sheffer, Jolie A. The Romance of Race: Incest, Breeding, and Multiculturalism in the Allied States, 1880-1930 (2012)

Skinazi, Karenic E. H. "'As to Breather Race, Its Secret Is Uproariously Revealed': Winnifred Eaton's Revision mislay North American Identity." MELUS: Class Journal of the Society detail the Study of the Multiethnic Literature of the United States 32(2): 31-53 (2007)

Teng, Rig Jinhua.

"The Eaton Sisters talented the Figure of the Eurasian." The Cambridge History of Dweller American Literature, ed. Min Hyoung Song, pp 661-672 (2015)

Watanna, Onoto. "A Half Caste" status Other Writings, edited by Linda Trinh Moser and Elizabeth Rooney, eds. (2003)

See also

References

External links