Dola de Jong
Dola de Jong was born in the Netherlands in 1911 but fled the country in 1940 and ended up in the United States. She was a novelist and a writer of children’s books, short stories and columns.
Her literary debut Dans om het hart (Dance for the Heart, 1939) drew on her early career as a dancer. In 1945, The Field is the World was published in New York to widespread acclaim and was edited by Maxwell Perkins, who had worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Two years later, the novel was published in Dutch as En de akker is de wereld and was awarded the City of Amsterdam’s Literature Prize. Her novel De thuiswacht (The Tree and the Vine), a wartime story of the love between two women, was published in the Netherlands in 1954. She won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in the US for her English-language mystery novel The Whirligig of Time (1964), which she translated into Dutch as De draaitol van de tijd (1965). Dola de Jong read Dutch literature for New York publishers and her recommendations led to the US publication of Anne Frank, Hugo Claus, Jan Cremer, Jef Geeraerts and Jan Wolkers among others. She died in California in 2003.
More Dola de Jong
The Tree and the Vine
Dola de Jong spent most of her life in America, where she enjoyed great success with her novel 'And the Field is the World'. It was discovered by the legendary editor Max Perkins. No less beautiful is The Tree and the Vine, set during the Nazi occupation of Europe. Following several rejections, this ‘shameless’ lesbian classic finally appeared in 1954, and in response the author received piles of fanmail from married women who felt at odds with themselves.
The Field
Aart and Lies, a young Jewish couple, flee the Netherlands on the eve of the Second World War and settle near the Moroccan city of Tangier. With their young son and the six refugee children they have taken under their wing on their journey south, they set about making a new home for themselves, living in a caravan and trying to farm an abandoned field. The subtle and unsentimental narrative recounts the growing pains of the children, as they struggle to hold their own in the face of incredible challenges.