Toshio Mori (1910-1980) was one of the founders of a distinctively Asian-American literature. He lived in and near San Leandro, Calif. except for the World War II years, which he and his family spent in the Topaz internment camp in the Utah desert.
Through most of his life as a writer he worked in his family's nursery by day and wrote at night, setting himself the strict schedule of writing from 10 p.m. until 2 a.m. -- every day. His "Yokohama, California," set to be published in 1942 but delayed by the war until 1949, was the first collection of short stories ever published by a Japanese-American.
In spite of critical acclaim and continued success in selling stories to newspapers and magazines, Mori's next book would not be published for another 30 years. By the 1970s, however, the rise of the Asian-American movement had opened up an audience of young Asian-American readers interested in discovering their literary forebears. The process of challenging the American literary canon and reclaiming important and talented minority writers resulted, in Mori's case, in the republication of his first collection of stories and the publication of a novel and a second volume of stories in the last years of his life.
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