Evelyn Toynton, a graduate of Bennington and the University of Chicago, is the author of three novels – Modern Art, The Oriental Wife, and Inheritance – and a short biography of Jackson Pollock, as well as a memoir of her German-Jewish family, escapees from Nazi Germany.
Modern Art, inspired by her friendship with Lee Krasner, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and translated into Russian. It was later chosen by the Phillips Auction House as one of its ten favourite novels about art and artists. The Oriental Wife, featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, was optioned for a film, and subsequently appeared in a Greek translation.
Photo © Miriam Berkley
Her book on Jackson Pollock, part of Yale University Press’s Icons of America series, was praised by Arthur Danto as ‘a Vasari-like narrative of Jackson Pollock…the book to read to find out what he was and was about.’ Her most recent book, published in 2024, is They Were Good Germans Once, portraits of her once highly assimilated Jewish family –-seven male members of her grandfathers’ generation served in the Kaiser’s army during World War I – and their very different fates.
Her essays, memoirs, and reviews have appeared in the London Review of Books, Harper’s, the Atlantic, the American Scholar, Salmagundi, The Threepenny Review, Prospect, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. She has also been included 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.
Since 1999, she has lived in England, on the North Norfolk coast.
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
