Evelyn Toynton, an American living in England, is the author of three novels – Modern Art, The Oriental Wife, and Inheritance – and a biography of Jackson Pollock, as well as a memoir of her German-Jewish refugee family published in May 2024. Her essays, short memoirs, and reviews have appeared in the London Review of Books, Harper’s, the Atlantic, the American Scholar, Salmagundi, The Threepenny Review, Prospect, and theTimes Literary Supplement, among other publications.
Modern Art was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was translated into Russian. The Oriental Wife was optioned for a film and appeared in a Greek translation. Her book on Jackson Pollock was part of Yale University Press’s Icons of America series. They Were Good Germans Once, her memoir of her German-Jewish family, was published by Delphinium/HarperCollins in May 2024.
Evelyn’s work has also appeared in a number of anthologies, including Rereadings (ed. Anne Fadiman); Mentors, Muses & Monsters (ed. Elizabeth Benedict); Table Talk from the Threepenny Review (ed. Wendy Lesser); and Novel Writing (eds. Romesh Gunesekera & A.L. Kennedy).
She has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the Djerassi Foundation, the Maison Dora Maar, the Chateau de Lavigny, the International Centre for Writers & Translators, and the Spiti tis Logotexnias.
Published 2024
“They Were Good Germans Once: A Memoir”
They Were Good Germans Once speaks to a universal immigrant family experience ― some embrace a new life, some forge a compromise between their new home and old traditions, while others never fully find their way.
Through a series of essays, Evelyn remember her own relatives, some of whom left Germany as soon as Hitler came to power, others only escaping much later.
Her family lost not only their native homeland and their sense of identity but many of the people they loved. Yet each found ways to give meaning to their lives, whether in their own small circles or in the world at large.
“This priceless recapturing of darkened history, this lifetime’s rumination on family, result in a stunningly intelligent and elegantly written work, whose honesty, maturity, perspective and wisdom are so rare in today’s memoirs. I found it utterly engrossing.”
– Phillip Lopate (author of To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction)
“A thoughtful, notable addition to the literature of the Holocaust and those survivors who started anew in America…a poignant memoir.”
– Kirkus Reviews