Mrs. Palmer's Honey

Winner of the George Washington Carver Award, Mrs. Palmer's Honey (1946) tells the story of Honey Hoop, a Black maid focused mainly on supporting her family and making ends meet. When, during the war effort, she takes a job at a munitions factory, she gets exposed to the organized labor efforts of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which her brother has joined, and becomes a social activist herself. While some critics called its programatic aspects "propaganda" in the time of this publication, today the novel stands as a document of the ways in which different sectors of American society came together to fight for justice, inclusion, and respect for Black Americans.

"This novel deals very skillfully with Honey's transformation from a simple domestic servant into an ardent worker in the cause of equal social and economic opportunity for her race."-The American Mercury

About the author:

Fannie Frank Cook (1893 - 1949) was a writer and social activist who worked for the advanced of Blacks, Jews, women, and the working class. Born to a German-Jewish immigrant family, she began to write as a child, and after completing her bachelor's at the University of Missouri, received a master's degree in English from Washington University, where she also taught. In addition to raising her two sons and teaching literature, Cook became active in local politics, including as Chairman of the Education Committee of the League of Women Voters in St. Louis. In 1930, she became chairman of the Race Relations Committee of city's Community Council, and eventually helped organize the Committee for the Rehabilitation of the Sharecroppers, which bought land for resettlement in what became known as Cropperville. Her first novel, The Hill Grows Steeper, was published in 1938. Before dying of a heart attack in 1949, she published five more novels-all of them portraying social ills with the goal of using literature to influence public opinion and to increase awareness of racial in justice in the United States.