In his introductory overview, Hugh Ruppersburg notes that, within the South, only Mississippi boasts a stronger fictional output than Georgia. I would suggest that by casting the term literature a bit more broadly, as this volume does, Georgia is probably unsurpassed in the impact its writers have had on how the South and the southern experience have been seen and understood by the rest of the nation and the world. By incorporating into that corpus the writings of statesmen and political figures like W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jimmy Carter; the texts of journalists like...

Among southern states, only Mississippi, by virtue of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, and Richard Wright, has produced a richer literature than Georgia. With such authors as Conrad Aiken, Erskine Caldwell, James Dickey, Joel Chandler Harris, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Alice Walker (not to mention Margaret Mitchell), Georgia holds a position of considerable literary prominence.

Georgia writing developed in response to the same events and forces that shaped the national literature: the disappearance of the frontier, the expansion of industry, the growth of cities, the trauma of war and depression, and the tumultuous events of the twentieth century....

Over a period of nearly fifty years Conrad Aiken published poems, essays, short stories, novels, and literary criticism. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1930 for Selected Poems (1929) and a National Book Award for Collected Poems (1953). His literary autobiography, Ushant, reveals the international nature of his complex life and literary career.

Conrad Potter Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia, on August 5, 1889, the eldest of four children of a prominent doctor from New York, William Aiken. The author’s mother, Anna, was the daughter of a prominent Massachusetts Unitarian minister. When Aiken was eleven, Aiken’s father killed his...

Raymond Andrews was a widely acclaimed novelist and chronicler of the African American experience in north central Georgia. His first novel, Appalachee Red, won the James Baldwin Prize for fiction in 1979.

The fourth of ten children of sharecropping parents, Andrews was born and reared near Madison. At fifteen he left home for Atlanta, where he worked during the day and attended night classes at Booker T. Washington High School. After graduating from high school he served four years in the U.S. Air Force, including a tour of duty in Korea. On returning he attended Michigan State University and then...

Novelist, journalist, essayist, and short-story writer Tina McElroy Ansa was born in Macon on November 18, 1949. Macon and its historic African American Pleasant Hill district serve as a model for the fictional town of Mulberry, the setting of her first four novels. After graduating from Spelman College in Atlanta in 1971, Ansa began work as editor and writer for the Atlanta Constitution and later the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. Since 1982 she has been a freelance writer with work appearing in magazines, newspapers, short-story collections, and nonfiction anthologies. She also contributed the essays “Postcards from Georgia” to the...

In the late nineteenth century Bill Arp’s weekly column in the Atlanta Constitution, syndicated to hundreds of newspapers, made him the South’s most popular writer. Others surpassed him in literary quality, but in numbers of regular readers, no one exceeded Bill Arp.

Bill Arp was born Charles Henry Smith in Lawrenceville on June 15, 1826. He married Mary Octavia Hutchins, the daughter of a wealthy lawyer and plantation owner, and started a family that would eventually include ten surviving children. Smith studied law with his father-in-law and then moved to Rome in 1851.

Smith took his famous pen name in...

Coleman Barks, a poet and professor emeritus at the University of Georgia (uga) in Athens, has gained world renown for his translations of Near Eastern poets, especially Jalal al-Din Rumi. He is also an accomplished poet, whose interest in Near Eastern mysticism infuses his observations of southern landscape and life. Barks has published six collections of his own poetry and numerous poetry translations, and his work has appeared in a wide array of anthologies, textbooks, and journals, including the Ann Arbor Review, Chattahoochee Review, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Plainsong, Rolling Stone, and Southern Poetry Review.

Coleman Bryan...

Vereen McNeill Bell wrote fiction and magazine articles set in the southern outdoors, and he achieved popular success with Swamp Water, a coming-of-age novel set in the Okefenokee Swamp. A World War II naval officer, Bell was killed during the Battle for Leyte Gulf.

The son of Jennie Vereen and Reason Chesnutt Bell, a prominent Georgia judge, Bell was born in Cairo on October 5, 1911. After graduating from North Carolina’s Davidson College in 1932, he began his career under the tutelage of Frederic Litten in Lake Charles, Louisiana, writing for “Sunday school” and juvenile magazines. In 1934 Bell married...

From the “ring-tailed roarers” of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s antebellum satire to the “rednecks” of Jeff Foxworthy’s New South schtick, Georgia has long been a fertile ground for humorists. A leading modern practitioner in this tradition is Roy Alton Blount Jr. — humorist, journalist, sportswriter, poet, novelist, performer, editor, lyricist, lecturer, screenwriter, dramatist, and philologist. Like many of the southwestern humorists more than a century before him, Blount seems a true Renaissance man — multitalented, highly educated, and capable of sophisticated wit, yet not so removed from his roots that he cannot appreciate the comedic possibilities of the southern, and

Born...

Adrienne Moore Bond, poet, fiction writer, scholar, and mentor to other writers, was a native of Macon County. She was born in 1933 to Violet Moore, a writer, and Sidney L. Moore Sr., an attorney. She earned her B.A. and M.F.A. from Mercer University (1954, 1971) and studied for the Ph.D. at Georgia State University. She taught in the English department at Mercer from 1965 until her death in 1996.

Bond’s main body of work is centered in three books. In The Voice of the Poet: The Shape and Sound of Southern Poetry Today (1989), she focused on a variety...

When David Bottoms was twenty-nine, his first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was chosen by Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren from more than thirteen hundred submissions as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. In 2000, at age fifty, Bottoms was appointed by Governor Roy Barnes as Georgia’s Poet Laureate. His many awards and publications over the past two decades attest to his stature as one of the South’s leading writers.

Bottoms was born on September 11, 1949, in Canton, the only child of David H. Bottoms,...

Elias Boudinot was a formally educated Cherokee who became the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper in the United States. In the mid-1820s the Cherokee Nation was under enormous pressure from surrounding states, especially Georgia, to move to a territory west of the Mississippi River. Ultimately, the Cherokee Nation was divided, with the majority opposing removal, and a small but influential minority, including Boudinot, favoring removal. As an educator, an advocate of Cherokee acculturation, and editor of the Phoenix, Boudinot played a crucial role in Cherokee history during the decades preceding the Nation’s forced removal, often...

When Edgar Bowers published his Collected Poems in 1997, literary critic Harold Bloom called him “one of the best living American poets these past forty years.” Although Bowers had received the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry, as well as two Guggenheim Fellowships, and though his work was admired and praised by such writers as Yvor Winters, Donald Justice, Richard Howard, Thomas Gunn, and Ted Hughes, he was largely unknown among readers of contemporary poetry. His modest productivity and, according to poet Leon Driskell, compact and rigorous formalism may account for his neglect in a time when confessionalism and poetic informalism...

As a poet who craved a connection with language from an early age, Van K. Brock began to contemplate a career in poetry while studying as an undergraduate at Emory University in Atlanta. Since his days there as both a student and a teacher, Brock has published several books of poetry.

Vandall Kline Brock was born on October 31, 1932, near Boston in Thomas County to Gladys Lewis, a teacher, and William Arthur Brock, a farmer. He first encountered poetry when his mother read it to him on a regular basis. He also began reading a great deal for himself....

Olive Ann Burns was a professional writer, journalist, and columnist for most of her life. She published two novels, one posthumously, and for many years was a staff writer for Atlanta newspapers and the Atlanta Journal Magazine. Her most notable achievement was Cold Sassy Tree, a novel that describes rural southern life and a young boy’s coming-of-age at the turn of the century.

Olive Ann Burns was born in Banks County on July 17, 1924, to Ruby Celestia Hight and William Arnold Burns. The youngest of four children, she grew up during the 1930s in her father’s hometown of Commerce...

Poet and essayist Kathryn Stripling Byer is a native of Georgia but has set most of her poems in the mountains of North Carolina. Creating an identity that is both distinct and in line with the concerns of southern culture, Byer reclaims in her poetry the traditions, customs, and voices of past Appalachian women. In doing so, she defines herself as an artist and, at the same time, addresses the concerns of women in today’s South.

Byer was born in Camilla, Georgia, in 1944 to C. M. Stripling, a farmer, and Bernice Campbell Stripling, a homemaker. She attended Wesleyan College...

Over the course of a long career, Erskine Caldwell wrote twelve books of nonfiction, twenty-five novels, and nearly 150 short stories. Profoundly influenced by his father, a minister and social reformer, he was intent on depicting life among the lowly in Georgia and the rest of the South. His concern for the less fortunate — poor whites and blacks — shines in his great novels and short stories of the 1930s. This concern also permeates the strongest writing of his later years, his nonfiction works of the 1960s.

Born December 17, 1903, in Coweta County, Caldwell was the only child...

The generative force behind Jean Toomer’s great work Cane was Georgia. Toomer grew up amid the African American elite in Washington, D.C., and attended the University of Wisconsin, the Massachusetts College of Agriculture, the American College of Physical Training in Chicago, the University of Chicago, and City College of New York. In 1920 he decided to become a writer, filled a trunk with manuscripts, and the next fall, at the age of twenty-six, took a position in Sparta, Georgia, as the substitute head of a small industrial school for blacks. On the train home to Washington just three months later,...

Jimmy Carter, the only Georgian elected president of the United States, held the office for one term, 1977–81. His previous public service included a stint in the U.S. Navy, two senate terms in the Georgia General Assembly, and one term as governor of Georgia (1971–75). After being defeated in the presidential election of 1980, he founded the Carter Center, a nonpartisan public policy center in Atlanta.

During his years of public service at the local, state, and federal levels, Carter’s policies contained a unique blend of liberal social values and fiscal conservatism. He emphasized comprehensive reform and stressed...

Poet, playwright, and short-story writer Turner Cassity has earned fame with the fine formal poetry he has published prolifically for forty years. Cassity’s poetry shares the sentiments of the New Formalist movement that matured in the 1980s: for example, the tendency to eschew the autobiographical, the preference for meter and rhyme over free verse, a stylized language, a taste for clarity, and the unfolding of a poem through narrative. Cassity’s wit, humor, stringent satire, and iconoclastic views as well as the musicality of his verse make of this southern writer a venerated poet.

Allen Turner Cassity was born in January...

The Chattahoochee Review is a literary journal published four times a year by Georgia Perimeter College. It features fiction, poetry, and essays by regional and national writers. The journal was founded in 1981 by Lamar York, a professor of English. In 1997 Lawrence Hetrick succeeded York as editor.

The Chattahoochee Review has achieved a national reputation for publishing both new writers and established writers. Recently published authors include Michael Bishop, Nicole Cooley, Walter Griffin, Anthony Grooms, Seaborn Jones, Terry Kay, Marjorie Kemper, Marion Montgomery, Ron Rash, and Virgil Suarez. The Review has taken as one of its missions advocacy for...

Brainard Cheney was a twentieth-century novelist, political speechwriter, and essayist from the wiregrass region of south Georgia. During a writing career that spanned four decades, Cheney published four novels — Lightwood (1939), River Rogue (1942), This Is Adam (1958), and Devil’s Elbow (1969) — that depict the social transformation of south Georgia between 1870 and 1960. These novels contain accounts of Cheney’s own coming of age (Devil’s Elbow) as well as land feuds (Lightwood), timber rafting (River Rogue), and race relations (This Is Adam) in the area where he grew up. Along with his wife, Frances Neel Cheney, he was...

Thomas Holley Chivers, poet and physician, published eleven volumes of poetry, plays, and pamphlets. He also contributed to leading antebellum literary periodicals and newspapers, especially the Georgia Citizen, and wrote a biography of Edgar Allan Poe, his friend and kindred spirit. Nevertheless, the eccentric Georgia writer never achieved the critical acclaim that he craved. Unfortunately, his famous legacy — the Poe-Chivers plagiarism controversy — has overshadowed his talent as a mystical poet.

Born and reared near Washington, Georgia, Chivers left Wilkes County after a failed youthful marriage. In 1830 he earned a medical degree from Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky,...

Pearl Cleage is a fiction writer, playwright, poet, essayist, and journalist who has lived in Atlanta for more than thirty years. In her writing, Cleage draws on her experiences as an activist for aids and women’s rights, and she cites the rhythms of black life as her muse. Cleage’s first novel, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, was an Oprah Book Club selection in 1998 and appeared on the New York Times best-seller list for nine weeks.

Cleage (pronounced “cleg”) was born on December 7, 1948, in Springfield, Massachusetts, the younger daughter of Doris Graham and Albert B....

Judith Ortiz Cofer is one of a number of Latina writers who rose to prominence during the 1980s and 1990s. Her stories about coming-of-age experiences in Puerto Rican communities outside of New York City and her poems and essays about cultural conflicts of immigrants to the U.S. mainland have made Ortiz Cofer a leading literary interpreter of the U.S.–Puerto Rican experience.

Ortiz Cofer was born in 1952 in the small town of Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, a semiurban municipality in the western part of the island. The author’s parents came to the United States in 1956 and settled in Paterson,...

The Color Purple is the international best-selling novel by Alice Walker, an African American writer from Eatonton. Published in 1982, Walker’s epistolary tale chronicles the startling tragedy and triumph of a poor black woman named Celie in her struggle for self-empowerment, sexual freedom, and spiritual growth in rural Georgia in the early twentieth century. The novel has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. As a film directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Quincy Jones in 1985, The Color Purple was nominated...

Contemporary southern author Pat Conroy has written a number of highly popular books, including The Water Is Wide, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, and Beach Music. Conroy also has achieved considerable success as a screenwriter. He is the author or coauthor of several Hollywood and television scripts, most notably the film adaptation of his own novel The Prince of Tides.

Donald Patrick Conroy was born in Atlanta on October 26, 1945, the eldest of seven children of Donald Conroy, a career U.S. Marine Corps pilot from Chicago, and Frances “Peggy” Peek Conroy, described by...

Poet, essayist, and editor Stephen Corey has lived and worked in Athens, Georgia, since 1983. As assistant, associate, and finally acting editor of the Georgia Review, he has helped shape the literary landscape in this country for the past two decades. He has also gained national recognition for his own poems and essays.

Corey was born on August 30, 1948, in Buffalo, New York, to Dale B. Corey, a certified public accountant, and Julienne Holmes, a nurse and homemaker. Educated at the State University of New York at Binghamton, Corey received a B.A. in 1971 and an M.A. in 1974....

Since the appearance of his first book of poems in 1976, Alfred Corn has distinguished himself as one of the most original poets writing in the United States. Known primarily as the author of nine volumes of poetry to date, Corn has also published one novel, a highly praised manual of prosody, a collection of essays, translations of poetry and drama, and critical writing on art, music, and the theater, as well as an edited collection of essays on the New Testament. Corn’s poetry is in the visionary mode of earlier American poets like Walt Whitman and Hart Crane, but...

Harry Crews is a prolific novelist whose often freakish characters populate a strange, violent, and darkly humorous South. He is also the author of a widely lauded memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, about growing up poor in rural south Georgia. Crews has focused much of his work on the poor white South, influencing a growing number of younger writers to do the same, including Larry Brown and Tim McLaurin.

Harry Eugene Crews was born in Bacon County on June 7, 1935, the second of two sons. His parents, Myrtice and Ray Crews, were poor farmers barely scratching...

A writer and a teacher of writing, Rosemary Daniell is known for her provocative poems and memoirs. Her works testify to the power of lived experience to supply rich material for writing and for the new forms of writing, especially confessional poetry and personal memoir, prevalent in women’s and ethnic literatures since the 1970s. In her stories of growing up female in the South, Daniell defies the implicit southern edict against women who publicly discuss their sexuality and anger, explores the psychology behind southern ideals of womanhood, and challenges the traditional gender and sexual roles of southern women.

Rosemary Hughes...

Since 1994 Janice Staten Daugharty has published a volume of short fiction, six novels, and numerous short stories and essays. She has built a national reputation as a chronicler of life and people in south Georgia and is one of the state’s most popular and prolific contemporary authors.

Janice Staten grew up in Echols County, the second of seven children of Frances and G. F. Staten. She married her high school sweetheart, Seward Daugharty, in 1963. She attended Valdosta State College for two years, performed the duties of a devoted wife and mother until her children were grown, and at...

James Dickey’s first novel, Deliverance, is an adventure story of a three-day canoe trip in the rugged wilderness of southern Appalachia, in which four suburbanites are brutalized both by the sheer force of the river and by violent and degenerate mountain men. Although James Dickey, an Atlanta native, never identified Georgia as the book’s setting, the city from which the four men come was widely assumed to have been Atlanta. The river where most of the book’s action takes place, the Cahulawassee, closely resembles the Chattooga River, which forms the border between Georgia and South Carolina in the former’s northeasternmost...

James Dickey ranks, along with Conrad Aiken, as one of the two most important Georgia poets in the twentieth century. His strongly visceral, sensory-laden descriptions and a poetic style that deviated from the intellectualism of such high modernist poets as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein made him a distinctive figure in contemporary American writing. He began to reach artistic maturity in the 1950s, and his work is typically considered alongside that of a number of other well known mid-century poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman. His poetry is intensely confessional, largely apolitical, and directly...

The play Driving Miss Daisy had its New York premiere on April 15, 1987, off Broadway at the Studio Theatre at Playwrights Horizons. Written by Alfred Uhry and directed by Ron Lagomarsino, the original theatrical production featured a cast including Atlanta native Dana Ivey as Miss Daisy, Morgan Freeman as Hoke, and Ray Gill as Boolie. The play received a Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and in 1989 it was adapted into a film directed by Bruce Beresford and starring Jessica Tandy, Morgan Freeman, and Dan Aykroyd. The film received nine Academy Award nominations and won for Best Picture, Best Actress,...

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) was an African American educator, historian, sociologist, and social activist who poignantly addressed the issues of racial discrimination, black social problems, and world peace during the first half of the twentieth century. During two extended stints in Atlanta, 1897–1910 and 1934–44, Du Bois contributed immensely to the black intellectual and activist community and produced a number of studies that explored the social, economic, and political conditions of African Americans in Georgia and across the United States.

In Georgia, Du Bois wrote some of his best-known works, including The Souls of Black...

A southern writer who has received much recognition for her gripping, insightful fiction, Pam Durban was professor of creative writing at Georgia State University from 1986 until 2001, when she moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Some of her earliest fiction bears the imprint of the time she spent as a textile worker in Atlanta in the early 1970s and of her interviews with residents of the community.

Durban has written several highly acclaimed short-story collections and novels, including All Set About with Fever Trees and Other Stories (1985), The Laughing Place (1993), and So Far...

Margaret Edson, a playwright and kindergarten teacher in Atlanta, is best known for Wit, a play about a literary scholar diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. Although Edson considers herself first an educator and then a playwright, her play has won many prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999.

Edson was born in Washington, D.C., on July 4, 1961. Her father, Peter Edson, was a newspaper columnist, and her mother, Joyce Edson, was a medical social worker. Edson briefly pursued her interest in drama during high school at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C.

After majoring in Renaissance...

Augusta Jane Evans wrote nine novels about southern women that were among the most popular fiction in nineteenth-century America. Her most successful novel, St. Elmo (1866), sold a million copies within four months of its appearance and remained in print well into the twentieth century. The sexual tensions between the book’s cynical Byronic hero, St. Elmo, and its beautiful Christian heroine, self-made writer Edna Earl, inspired the christening of villages, plantations, steamboats, railway carriages, male infants, a punch, a cigar, and one infamous parody, St. Twel’mo, or the Cuneiform Cyclopedist of Chattanooga (1867). Edna Earl also later became the namesake...

Founded in 1996, Five Points has achieved an international following and attracted some of today’s most distinguished poets and fiction writers. Published three times yearly by Georgia State University’s Department of English and its creative writing program, the magazine has established a reputation for the diversity and quality of the writers, artists, essayists, and interviewers it publishes. “We always say that our only standard is excellence,” says Megan Sexton, Five Points executive editor. Poet Phillip Levine calls the journal a “refreshing combination of the old and the new. The best literary magazine I’ve read in ages!”

Founded by poet and...

Publishers Weekly magazine once called Berry Fleming “the quintessential Southern writer; funny, wise and like the best of those from the South, an incredibly good storyteller.” His long career began in 1927 with the publication of The Conqueror’s Stone, an adventure story about a bloodthirsty pirate off the South Carolina coast. Fleming is best known for his novel Colonel Effingham’s Raid, published in 1943. Among his other books are Siesta (1935), The Lightwood Tree (1947), The Fortune Tellers (1951), Carnival (1953), The Winter Rider (1960), Lucinderella (1967), The Acrobats (1969), The Make-Believers (1972), The Affair at Honey Hill (1981), and...

Francis Fontaine, an aristocrat possessed of a cultivated mind and brilliant conversational abilities, was a Renaissance man of nineteenth-century Georgia. A fearless Confederate soldier, a newspaper editor, Georgia’s representative to the Paris Exposition, a delegate to the state constitutional convention of 1877, and a force in Atlanta real estate and lending concerns, he is best remembered for his literary endeavors.

Born May 7, 1845, in Columbus to John Fontaine, first mayor of that city and one of Georgia’s leading entrepreneurs, and his wife, Mary Ann Stewart, Francis Fontaine was a student at the Georgia Military Institute in Marietta when the...

The Georgia Center for the Book is the state affiliate of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Based at the DeKalb County Public Library in Decatur, the Georgia Center provides collaborative support and focus for the state’s literary community of libraries, authors, educators, publishers, booksellers, and readers, with a particular emphasis on promoting the rich literary heritage of Georgia. Since receiving its affiliate charter in 1997, the center has presented dozens of well-known authors in public forums around the state; inaugurated two statewide literary programs for students; created an “All Georgia Reading the...

The Georgia humorists were early-nineteenth-century writers who published satiric sketches about the lawlessness and debauchery of frontier conditions in antebellum Georgia. Mostly lawyers, newspaper editors, and other professional men, they included Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790–1870), William Tappan Thompson (1812–82), and John Basil Lamar (1812–62). Lesser-known writers were T. A. Burke, T. W. Lane, and Francis James Robinson. More conservative than the later writers who followed the southwestern expansion of the frontier toward the Mississippi River (such Southwest humorists as Johnson Jones Hooper of Alabama, Thomas Bangs Thorpe of Louisiana, and George Washington Harris of Tennessee), the Georgia...

Georgia launched its first major campaign against obscene literature in 1953, when the General Assembly unanimously voted to establish the Georgia Literature Commission. The onset of the paperback book revolution in the years after World War II, the rising popularity of adult magazines, and the introduction of Playboy magazine in the United States led the legislature to create the commission, consisting of three members who would meet monthly to investigate literature that they suspected to be “detrimental to the morals of the citizens of Georgia.” If the commission determined something to be obscene, it had the power to inhibit distribution...

In 1932 the radical journalist John Spivak published Georgia Nigger, a thinly fictionalized condemnation of Georgia’s penal system that unveiled the harsh working conditions and brutal treatment suffered by African Americans in the state’s convict camps. Walter White, the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), described Spivak’s novel as “the most devastating exposé of the treatment of Negroes in the Georgia chaingang that has ever been written.” Nevertheless, Georgia Nigger was ultimately overshadowed by Robert Elliot Burns’s I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!, which was published the same year.

In...

The Georgia State Poetry Society was founded by Edward Davin Vickers and Charles J. Bruehler on August 30, 1979, in Atlanta. Its objectives were to stimulate the reading and writing of poetry. The society was incorporated in 1981 and later changed its name to the Georgia Poetry Society.

The society is a member of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (nfsps). The nfsps is a nonprofit educational and literary organization that seeks to recognize the importance of poetry in America’s cultural heritage, to further the appreciation of poetry on a national level, and to unite poets in the bond...

The Georgia Review is an internationally distributed quarterly journal of arts and letters featuring general interest and interdisciplinary essays as well as short stories, poems, book reviews, and full-color visual art. First published in 1947 at the University of Georgia (uga) and based there to the present day, this highly regarded literary periodical has published such notable past and current authors as Conrad Aiken, Harry Crews, Rita Dove, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Ernest J. Gaines, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Sexton, Robert Penn Warren, and Eudora Welty. At the same time, the Review has earned a reputation for being open and...

The Georgia Writers Association formed in 1994 as a nonprofit support and advocacy group for writers in the state. As its mission, “The Georgia Writers Association seeks to improve the quality of life for writers by providing information about the literary industry and skills-building knowledge; fostering ongoing communication among writers of diverse literacy, genres, geographies, ethnicities, and backgrounds; increasing public awareness of the lives and works of contemporary Georgia writers; encouraging the imagination and integrity of the written word; and organizing activities that celebrate the achievements of writers across the state of Georgia.” The association sponsors conferences, seminars, monthly meetings...

As part of the University of Georgia’s Year 2000 millennial celebration, the University Libraries established the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame — a public awards program and a permanent Internet exhibit honoring Georgia’s most influential writers.

The mission of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame is “to recognize Georgia writers, past and present, whose work reflects the character of the state — its land and its people. Although there are a few award programs in the state that recognize specific books, the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame is the first to honor Georgia writers for their overall contribution to our...

Although Erskine Caldwell wrote more than sixty books, twenty-five novels among them, he is best known for two works of long fiction, Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933). God’s Little Acre remains Caldwell’s single most popular work, having sold more than ten million copies. Along with the less well-known Journeyman (1935), these books make up a seriocomic trilogy of Georgia life in the first half of the twentieth century. They detail the ruination of the land, the growth of textile mills, and the abiding influence of fundamentalist religion in the South. They present a radical contrast to the...

Atlantan Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Georgia, Gone With the Wind, occupies an important place in any history of twentieth-century American literature. Dismissed by most academic literary critics for being uneven, flawed, and conventionally written in an age marked by literary experimentation, and attacked by some cultural commentators as promulgating racist myths and undermining the very foundations of its basically feminist paradigm, the best-selling novel of the twentieth century continues to withstand its detractors.

Upon its publication, reviewers drew comparisons with William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Margaret Mitchell...

Henry W. Grady, the “Spokesman of the New South,” served as managing editor for the Atlanta Constitution in the 1880s. A member of the Atlanta Ring of Democratic political leaders, Grady used his office and influence to promote a New South program of northern investment, southern industrial growth, diversified farming, and white supremacy.

Henry Woodfin Grady was born on May 24, 1850, in Athens. His father, William S. Grady, a successful merchant who served as a major in the Confederate army, died in the fall of 1864 from wounds received at the siege of Petersburg. Brought up after his father’s...

Julien Green, novelist, autobiographer, dramatist, critic, and first non-French national elected to the Académie Française (1971), was greatly attached to his American nationality and to his roots in Georgia. A large section of his writing constitutes a quest for identity by an American living abroad in France.

Green was born in Paris of American parents; his mother was from Savannah, Georgia, his father from Virginia. He was baptized Julien Hartridge Green in honor of his maternal grandfather, Georgia Congressman Julian Hartridge. His paternal grandfather, Charles Green, from Halesowen, England, attained great wealth in the cotton industry in Savannah, where his...

Melissa Fay Greene’s award-winning books Praying for Sheetrock and The Temple Bombing chronicle dramatic episodes in the civil rights movement in Georgia. Focusing on individuals who played important roles in these events, Greene vividly illuminates issues and conflicts that shaped the state in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Melissa Fay Greene, the daughter of Rosalyn Pollock and Gerald A. Greene, was born on December 30, 1952, in Macon. In 1959 the family moved to Dayton, Ohio, where she grew up and attended school. In 1975 she received her B.A. degree with high honors from Oberlin College and subsequently...

Poet, teacher, and founder of the Atlanta Poets Workshop, Walter Griffin has spent his career identifying with and celebrating what he calls “the Blue Glass Charlies”: the transients, the losers, and the outsiders down on their luck whose lives go unnoticed in the boardinghouses, cheap hotels, and bus stations of middle America.

Griffin was born on August 1, 1937, in Wilmington, Delaware, the only child of Nina Blalock and William Samuel Griffin. A year after Griffin was born, his father abandoned the family, and Griffin and his mother relocated to Florida. He spent his childhood in Florida and South Carolina,...

Georgia-born humorist and best-selling author Lewis Grizzard conveyed the ambivalence of many white southerners who embraced the economic and material benefits of Sunbelt prosperity while remaining skeptical and sometimes resentful of some of the social and political changes that accompanied these gains.

Born in Fort Benning on October 20, 1946, Lewis McDonald Grizzard Jr. grew up in Moreland, where he moved with his schoolteacher mother, Christine, after his father, army captain Lewis McDonald Grizzard Sr., left them. (Grizzard later memorialized his parents in his books My Daddy Was a Pistol and I’m a Son of a Gun [1986] and Don’t...

Anthony “Tony” M. Grooms is a writer and arts administrator who is well known in the Atlanta area for his work in organizing arts events and for his support and encouragement of other writers.

Born January 15, 1955, Grooms was raised and educated in rural Louisa County, Virginia, 120 miles south of Washington, D.C. The eldest of six children, he grew up among an extended African American family that also claimed Native American and European heritage.

His parents — Robert E. Grooms, a refrigeration mechanic, and Dellaphine Scott, a textile worker and housewife — encouraged his education. In 1967, as...

Evelyn Hanna was one of a number of southern women whose writing became known as one of Georgia’s new “money crops.” Like her contemporary Margaret Mitchell, Hanna used the American Civil War as a backdrop for her romantic fiction. The Atlanta Journal touted her novel Blackberry Winter (1938) as “a possible companion for Gone With the Wind for screen entertainment” and enlisted Hanna in the literary renaissance of the South, characterized by depictions of “that determination to endure,” as critic Medora Field Perkerson expressed it.

Born October 12, probably in 1900, in Thomaston, Evelyn Hanna was the daughter of Jessie...

Considered a minor author today, Will Harben was one of the most popular novelists in America during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Although in his thirty books and numerous short stories Harben portrays the mountaineers of his native north Georgia with authenticity and color, the sentimental romanticism demanded by readers of his day mars his novels, consequently diminishing his position in the world of letters. However his sharp, sincere observations of the speech, manners, wisdom, and morality of north Georgia mountaineers are a significant contribution to the literature of the American South.

William Nathaniel Harben was born...

Novelist Corra White Harris was one of the most celebrated women from Georgia for nearly three decades in the early twentieth century. She is best known for her first novel, A Circuit Rider’s Wife (1910), though she gained a national audience a decade before its publication. From 1899 through the 1920s, she published hundreds of essays and short stories and more than a thousand book reviews in such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, and especially the Independent, a highly reputable New York-based periodical known for its political, social, and literary critiques.

Harris established...

One of the South’s most treasured authors, Joel Chandler Harris gained national prominence for his numerous volumes of Uncle Remus folktales. Harris’s long-standing legacy as a “progressive conservative” New South journalist, folklorist, fiction writer, and children’s author continues to influence our society today.

Harris was born in Eatonton on December 9, 1845 (not 1848, as traditionally believed). His mother, Mary Ann Harris, had left Richmond County to live in Eatonton — the original hometown of her maternal grandmother, Tabitha Turman — with her lover. Harris’s father, however, whose identity is uncertain, deserted his young family shortly after his son’s birth....

The first novel by Georgia writer Carson McCullers (1917–67), The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is commonly treated as a coming-of-age story by readers and critics alike. Many of the characters in the novel are grotesques, a term in southern literature for those who are known for their exaggerated attributes, unusual characteristics, or obsessive-compulsive thought processes or behaviors. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a compelling portrait of isolated characters and of their longing for self-expression, human connection, and spiritual integration.

Born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, McCullers was in her early twenties when she wrote The Heart...

Mary Hood is best known for her work as a short-story writer, although she regularly publishes reviews and essays in popular and literary magazines. Hood’s first collection of stories, How Far She Went (1984), won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Southern Review / Louisiana State University Short Fiction Award. Two years later And Venus Is Blue (1986), Hood’s second collection, won the Townsend Prize for Fiction and the Dixie Council of Authors and Journalists Author-of-the-Year Award. The stories in these two collections have been chosen for twenty-two anthologies in the “best and new” categories and have...

Mac Hyman published only one book before he died at the age of thirty-nine. He secured international fame, however, with that novel, No Time for Sergeants.

Hyman was born August 25, 1923, in Cordele. He discovered his passion for writing when he was a student at Cordele High School, and he first displayed his skill in a humorous article published in the school newspaper. Although Hyman frequently lived away from his hometown, he always returned to it; he once said that he felt more at home in Cordele than anywhere else. After graduating from high school Hyman studied for a...

I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! was a sensational best-selling book by Robert Elliott Burns. Published in 1932, it recounts the dramatic story of the author’s imprisonment in Georgia and his two successful escapes, eight years apart, with seven years of freedom, business success, and emotional intrigue in between. It was also the basis of a popular movie entitled I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, produced later that year by Warner Brothers.

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Burns was a drifter and a battle-scarred World War I (1917–18) veteran who found himself living...

Arthur Crew Inman was a reclusive and unsuccessful poet whose seventeen-million-word diary, extending from 1919 to 1963, provides a panoramic record of people, events, and observations from more than four decades of the twentieth century.

Inman was born in 1895 into one of the most powerful and affluent families in Atlanta. His grandfather was Samuel Martin Inman, a wealthy cotton magnate and philanthropist who owned a portion of the Atlanta Constitution and was an early director for the Georgia Institute of Technology. Inman felt close to neither of his parents, Roberta Sutherland Crew and Henry Arthur Inman, and expressed relief...

A widely acclaimed author of novels, short stories, and poetry, Ha Jin launched his writing career in 1990 — just three years before joining the creative writing faculty of Emory University — with the publication of a collection of poems entitled Between Silences: A Voice from China. Since that first book, he has produced several other works, including two additional volumes of poetry: Facing Shadows (1996) and Wreckage (2001); three short-story collections: Ocean of Words: Army Stories (1996), which won the pen/Hemingway Award, Under the Red Flag (1997), which garnered the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and The Bridegroom:...

Georgia Douglas Johnson was an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance, the literary and cultural movement that flourished in the predominantly black Harlem neighborhood of New York City after World War I (1917–18). Johnson’s four volumes of poetry, The Heart of a Woman (1918), Bronze (1922), An Autumn Love Cycle (1928), and Share My World (1962), established her as one of the most accomplished African American woman poets of the literary movement.

Johnson was born in Atlanta on September 10, around the year 1877, to Laura Jackson and George Camp. Johnson graduated from Atlanta University Normal College in 1896....

An award-winning short-story writer, novelist, poet, biographer, and scholar, Greg Johnson is a professor of English and a faculty member in the graduate writing program at Kennesaw State University. A frequent reviewer for such publications as the New York Times Book Review, Georgia Review, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Johnson has published two novels, a study of Emily Dickinson, three critical works on Joyce Carol Oates, a book of poems, and three collections of short fiction.

Born July 13, 1953, in San Francisco, Johnson moved with his family to Liverpool, England, for three years and then to Tyler, Texas. He received B.A....

After an early career as a journalist and short-story writer, Georgia native Nunnally Johnson emerged as one of Hollywood’s most accomplished screenwriters and producers from the 1930s through the 1950s, when he began to direct motion pictures as well.

Nunnally Johnson was born on December 5, 1897, in Columbus to Johnnie Pearl Patrick and James Nunnally Johnson. His father worked as a superintendent for the Central of Georgia Railway, and his mother was an activist on the local school board. An avid reader with an acute sense of humor, Johnson grew up and attended school in Columbus, his mother’s hometown....

Richard Malcolm Johnston was a lawyer, teacher, and dialect humorist from Hancock County. A disciple of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, he called his first book Georgia Sketches (1864) in honor of Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes (1835). In an enlarged form, this collection was renamed Dukesborough Tales (1871); the second edition of Dukesborough Tales, published in 1883, launched his national literary career.

Johnston’s writing has been called a bridge between antebellum humor and postbellum local color traditions. In his four novels and six other collections of stories, he never strayed far from the themes he explored in Dukesborough Tales, which included schooling, law,...

Tayari Jones, born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, has written a number of short stories and articles and is best known for her two novels, Leaving Atlanta (2002), about the Atlanta child murders in 1979–81, and The Untelling (2005). Although she has not lived in her hometown for almost a decade, her stories and literary imagination center on Georgia and its capital city.

Born to Mack and Barbara Jones in 1970, Jones spent most of her childhood in southwest Atlanta, with the exception of 1983, when her father, a Clark Atlanta University professor on a Fulbright Scholarship, took the...

Margaret Walker’s novel Jubilee, the 1966 winner of Houghton Mifflin’s Literary Fellowship Award, is one of the first novels to present the nineteenth-century African American historical experience in the South from a black and female point of view. The novel is a fictionalized account of the life of Walker’s great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown, who was born a slave in Dawson in Terrell County and lived through Reconstruction in southwest Georgia. It is based on stories told to Walker by her maternal grandmother. Walker herself was not a Georgian by birth. Born in Alabama, she spent most of her teaching...

Terry Kay is the author of nine novels, a children’s book, a collection of nonfiction prose, and several screenplays. His novel To Dance with the White Dog became a best-seller that was dramatized by the Hallmark Hall of Fame in a televised production.

Terry Winter Kay was born February 10, 1938, in Hart County, the eleventh of twelve children of T. H. Kay, a farmer and nurseryman, and Viola Winn Kay. He grew up on a farm, played football for Royston High School, and earned his B.A. degree in social science from LaGrange College in 1959. In August of that...

James Patrick Kilgo, an essayist and novelist, wrote with a reverence for the natural world and a deep and abiding sense of family and history. His essays on hunting, nature, family, and personal introspection won him national attention, and his novel, Daughter of My People, earned him the Townsend Prize for Fiction.

The son of John and Caroline Kilgo, he was born and grew up in Darlington, South Carolina. He received his undergraduate degree from Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English from Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Kilgo joined the faculty...

The African American writer John Oliver Killens, a native of Macon, drew on his own encounters with racism to compose such works as Youngblood, a classic of social protest fiction. Working within a tradition that coupled art with activism, Killens said, “There is no such thing as art for art’s sake. All art is propaganda, although there is much propaganda that is not art.” The founding chairman of the celebrated Harlem Writers Guild, Killens became a spiritual father of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Like the writer Richard Wright, whom he greatly admired, Killens inspired a subsequent generation...

No southerner was more outspoken in expressing moral indignation about the region’s injustices and inequities during the pre–civil rights era than the writer Lillian Smith, and in no work did she articulate that indignation more fully than in Killers of the Dream. First published in 1949, and revised and expanded in 1961, it is arguably the most influential and enduring of the many writings this self-described “tortured southern liberal” produced over her three-decade career.

Smith had already established a national reputation as an unrelenting critic of southern racism with the publication of her controversial novel Strange Fruit in 1944...

Martin Luther King Jr., Baptist minister and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was the most prominent African American leader in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Family, church, and education were the central forces shaping King’s early life. Michael Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, the son of Alberta Williams and Michael Luther King Sr. In 1934, after visiting Europe, Michael King Sr. changed his and his son’s name in honor of the sixteenth-century German church reformer Martin Luther. King spent his early years in the family home at 501...

Sidney Lanier contributed significantly to the arts in nineteenth-century America. His accomplishments as a poet, novelist, composer, and critic reflect his eclectic interests, and his melodic celebrations of Georgia’s terrain are among his most widely read poems. His works reflect a love of the land, as well as his concern over declining values and commercial culture in the Reconstruction South. Some of his writings extol the rhythmic natural world and the religious vision it evokes. Lake Lanier was dedicated to him in 1955 in recognition of his life and accomplishments.

Sidney Lanier was born in Macon on February 3, 1842....

As editor of the Georgia Review from 1977 until his death, Stanley Lindberg was nationally and internationally recognized for transforming a good regional literary magazine into one of the best magazines of its time, a handsome and colorful quarterly filled with excellent essays, poetry, fiction, and artwork created by distinguished artists from the state, the South, the nation, and abroad. In addition, he conceived and produced, or shared responsibility for, some of the most daring and stimulating cultural events the state of Georgia has hosted, including a celebration of Georgia’s own heritage in creative writing — the “Roots in Georgia”...

In 1835 Augustus Baldwin Longstreet published Georgia’s first important literary work, Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, Etc. in the First Half Century of the Republic. Because of this book he is remembered most often as a literary figure. Longstreet, however, only dabbled in fiction writing, just as he dabbled in many other careers, including roles as a lawyer, judge, state senator, newspaper editor, minister, political propagandist, and college president.

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet was born in Augusta in September 1790 to Hannah Randolph and William Longstreet. His father was a sometime politician and failed inventor. His mother was the driving force behind...

The radical novels that Grace Lumpkin wrote in the 1930s, To Make My Bread and A Sign for Cain, represent two of the best examples of literary social realism produced in response to the economic and social turmoil of the Great Depression. Lumpkin used the Loray Mill strike, which took place in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929, and the Scottsboro case, which erupted in Alabama in 1931, as the historical and social backdrops for her novels. She proudly answered the call made in 1929 by Mike Gold, a prominent literary critic with ties to the Communist Party, for socially conscious...

Sociologist, activist, teacher, and writer, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin spent a lifetime studying and combating economic and racial oppression. She is best known for her autobiography, The Making of a Southerner.

Katharine Lumpkin was born in 1897 in Macon, Georgia, to William Lumpkin and Annette Caroline Morris Lumpkin. As a member of a prominent Georgia family and the daughter of a Civil War veteran, she was inculcated in the cultural mythologies of the Lost Cause and white supremacy. The Lumpkin children responded differently to their upbringing: although Katharine’s eldest sister, Elizabeth, remained committed to the Lost Cause, another sister, Grace,...

The publication in 1998 of A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe’s mammoth novel about the making of modern Atlanta, became the biggest single event in the city’s cultural life since the world premiere in 1939 of Gone With the Wind at Loew’s Grand Theater. Wolfe’s impact on Atlanta has been compared with General William T. Sherman’s in 1864, and his judgments were given the same weight as International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch’s critical assessment of Atlanta’s Olympic Games of 1996.

Wolfe, born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, is a former newspaper reporter and the best-selling author of such...

The author of poems, plays, novels, and short stories, Frank Manley writes mostly about southern characters in marginal encounters that force them to engage spiritual questions or dilemmas of faith and reason. Moving easily between academic and literary careers, Manley has produced a wide-ranging body of work, with critical editions of John Donne and Sir Thomas More, poems about Roman emperors, and violent tales involving trailer parks and mountain cockfighting arenas. Manley grew up in pre–World War II Atlanta, yet he emerged as a southern writer much later, midway through what could be considered his first career, as professor...

Frances Mayes has achieved wide recognition for two best-selling books about her life and her second home in Italy: Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy and Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy.

Mayes was born in Fitzgerald to Garbert and Frankye Davis Mayes. Her exact birth date is unknown. She attended Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia and obtained her B.A. from the University of Florida and her M.A. from San Francisco State University in 1975. She taught creative writing at San Francisco State University until 2001. She married her second husband, poet Ed Kleinschmidt in 1998.

Mayes...

With a collection of work including five novels, two plays, twenty short stories, more than two dozen nonfiction pieces, a book of children’s verse, a small number of poems, and an unfinished autobiography, Carson McCullers is considered to be among the most significant American writers of the twentieth century. She is best known for her novels The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Café, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and The Member of the Wedding, all published between 1940 and 1946. At least four of her works have been made into films.

Born Lula Carson Smith...

Ralph McGill, as editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, was a leading voice for racial and ethnic tolerance in the South from the 1940s through the 1960s. As an influential daily columnist, he broke the code of silence on the subject of segregation, chastising a generation of demagogues, timid journalists, and ministers who feared change. When the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregated schools in 1954 and southern demagogues led defiance of the court, segregationists vilified McGill as a traitor to his region for urging white southerners to accept the end of segregation. In 1959, at the age of sixty-one,...

Essayist, short-story writer, and critic, James Alan McPherson is among that generation of African American writers and intellectuals, including Charles Johnson and Stanley Crouch, who were inspired and mentored by Ralph Ellison. McPherson’s early short story “Gold Coast” won the 1965 Atlantic Monthly Firsts award. In 1978 he was the first African American recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his 1977 story collection, Elbow Room. Frequently anthologized, McPherson has received such prestigious honors as a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972–73), the MacArthur Fellowship (1981), several Pushcart Prizes, and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1995).

Born...

Along with her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers’s third novel, The Member of the Wedding, and the play adapted from it remain her most enduring literary achievements. Born in 1917 in Columbus, Carson McCullers revealed at a young age the creative genius that would distinguish her as one of the South’s most talented writers. After publishing The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in 1940 at age twenty-three, McCullers began writing The Member of the Wedding.

Like her first novel, The Member of the Wedding (1946) evokes the solitude and uncertainty of a young outcast in...

The impact of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil on Savannah has been greater than that of any other book in the city’s history. Written by John Berendt and published by Random House in January 1994, the nonfiction narrative quickly became known locally as simply “The Book.” Since that time it has sold more than three million copies in 101 printings, has been translated into twenty-three languages and appeared in twenty-four foreign editions, and has brought hundreds of thousands of tourists to Savannah to visit this loveliest of crime scenes. The one point on which both critics and...

Caroline Miller published her first novel, Lamb in His Bosom, in 1933 and became the first Georgian to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The thirty-year-old housewife and author produced one of the most critically acclaimed first novels of the Southern Renaissance period. In addition to the Pulitzer, the novel earned France’s Prix Femina in 1934 and became an immediate best-seller.

Miller, the youngest of seven children, was born August 26, 1903, in Waycross to Elias Pafford, a schoolteacher and Methodist minister, and his wife, Levy Zan Hall Pafford. Miller’s father died while she was in junior high school; her...

Examining basic human themes within the specific landscape of Georgia, Judson Mitcham’s writing is both poignant and powerful. His poetry has been widely published, appearing in such journals as Harper’s, Georgia Review, Chattahoochee Review, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, and Southern Review. His poetry collection Somewhere in Ecclesiastes earned him both the Devins Award and recognition as Georgia Author of the Year. His first novel, The Sweet Everlasting, won him the Townsend Prize for Fiction and a second Georgia Author of the Year award. Sabbath Creek, his second novel, also won the Townsend Prize, making Mitcham the first writer...

Margaret Mitchell was the author of Gone With the Wind, one of the most popular books of all time. The novel was published in 1936 and sold more than a million copies in the first six months, a phenomenal feat considering it was the depression era. More than 30 million copies of this Civil War–era masterpiece have been sold worldwide in thirty-eight countries. It has been translated into twenty-seven languages. Approximately 250,000 copies are still sold each year. Shortly after the book’s publication the movie rights were sold to David O. Selznick for $50,000, the highest amount ever paid...

Poet, novelist, intellectual, and literary critic, Marion Hoyt Montgomery taught composition, literature, and creative writing at the University of Georgia for thirty-three years. He also wrote hundreds of poems, twenty-seven short stories, three novels, and one novella. Montgomery has published seventeen books of literary and cultural criticism. He received numerous awards for his fiction and verse in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 2001 he received the Stanley W. Lindberg Award for outstanding contributions to Georgia’s literary heritage.

Montgomery was born in Thomaston, the son of Lottie May Jenkins and Marion H. Montgomery. He served in the U.S. Army from...

Frances Newman was a novelist, translator, critic, book reviewer, and librarian. Writing within a feminist tradition of southern fiction that has been nearly forgotten, Newman differed from her feminist contemporaries Ellen Glasgow, Mary Johnston, and Isa Glenn in her playful humor and stylistic experimentation. Her novels portrayed the widely acclaimed social change in the South at the turn of the century as superficial rather than substantial for women, who continued to have restrictive roles in marriage and limited educational and career opportunities. Her modernist novels The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926) and Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers (1928) stunned her native Atlanta...

Flannery O’Connor is considered one of America’s greatest fiction writers and one of the strongest apologists for Roman Catholicism in the twentieth century. Born of the marriage of two of Georgia’s oldest Catholic families, O’Connor was a devout believer whose small but impressive body of fiction presents the soul’s struggle with what she called the “stinking mad shadow of Jesus.”

Born in Savannah on March 25, 1925, Mary Flannery O’Connor began her education in the city’s parochial schools. After the family’s move to Milledgeville in 1938, she continued her schooling at the Peabody Laboratory School associated with Georgia State College...

Economy of form, biting satire, vivid characterizations, and a stern moral vision are the defining characteristics of Flannery O’Connor’s short fiction. Her reputation as a short-story writer rests on two volumes, only the first of which appeared in her lifetime: A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). Everything That Rises Must Converge was published in 1965, a year after her death from lupus.

O’Connor began writing fiction in earnest at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the late 1940s. During her apprentice years there, she enjoyed the advice of such older writers as Paul Engle, Caroline Gordon, Robert Lowell, Andrew...

Eugenia Price is known for her best-selling historical fiction, much of which is set in Georgia. At the time of her death in 1996, Price had written fourteen novels, twenty-two inspirational books, and three autobiographies. Her books have sold more than forty million copies. Most of her novels appeared on the New York Times best-seller list, including her last novel, The Waiting Time, published after her death.

Eugenia Price was born on June 22, 1916, in Charleston, West Virginia, to Anna Davidson and Walter Wesley Price, an upper-middle-class couple of German, Scottish, and Welsh ancestry. Price often credited her mother...

Wyatt Prunty is identified with a widely based movement among poets sometimes called the New Formalism. Such poets use form (verse and meter) and narrative as a way of exploring and expressing meaning. Prunty does not restrict his poetry to preestablished forms but employs control and order as liberating means of expression. He writes about domestic subjects — his parents, family, personal experiences, and modern life. He is the author of six collections of poetry and one book of criticism and is a frequent reviewer or essayist for poetry and literary journals.

Eugene Wyatt Prunty was born on May 15,...

Janisse Ray, an environmental activist and poet, is the award-winning author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, a highly praised book that combines elements of ecology and autobiography into a multifaceted work. As activist and memoirist, Ray alternates chapters between her childhood in rural southern Georgia and the ecological history of that region — an effective switch that shows the delicate symbiotic nature of the landscape and the people who are irrevocably connected with the land.

Ray was born on February 2, 1962, and grew up near Baxley in rural Appling County on land that she has described as “about...

Byron Herbert Reece was the author of four books of poetry and two novels. During his short career he received attention throughout the United States for his poems. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, earned two Guggenheim awards, and served as writer-in-residence at the University of California at Los Angeles, Emory University, and Young Harris College. He never achieved wide recognition, however, and is known today as the poet whose old-fashioned, finely crafted ballads and lyrics celebrate the life and heritage of the north Georgia mountains.

Born near Blood Mountain above Dahlonega on September 14, 1917, Reece entered a...

John Rollin Ridge (also known as Cheesquatalawny and Yellow Bird), considered the first Native American novelist, was born near New Echota (near the present city of Rome) on March 19, 1827. His grandfather Major Ridge, his father, John Ridge, and his uncles Elias Boudinot (Buck Watie) and Stand Watie led the Cherokee “Treaty Party,” which signed a removal agreement at New Echota in 1835. The four leaders were marked for execution by members of the John Ross party in 1839. All but Stand Watie were killed, and twelve-year-old John Rollin Ridge witnessed his father’s murder.

Publicly, the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot family embraced...

Larry Jerome Rubin has published hundreds of poems in literary magazines and four volumes of selected verse since he came to Atlanta in 1950 and began his long academic career as an English professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1956. Though Rubin has appeared in several collections of contemporary southern poets, his poems characteristically focus on ahistorical images and the interior self rather than on any particular time or place. Rubin is a self-described romantic poet whose inspirations include Emily Dickinson and whose writing includes several articles on American romantic literature.

Rubin was born in 1930 in Bayonne,...

A physician, humorist, storyteller, and best-selling novelist, Ferrol Sams is the author of seven books. Most notable is his trilogy of novels in which an eccentric and quixotic hero, Porter Osborne Jr., mirrors Sams’s own Georgia boyhood. All of his works are rooted in the oral traditions of southern humor and folklore. With engaging and graceful prose, Sams’s fiction celebrates love of the land, the changing southern landscape, and what he calls “being raised right” in the rural South.

One of four children born to Mildred Matthews and Ferrol Sams Sr., the Fayette County school superintendent, Ferrol Sams Jr. (nicknamed...

Bettie Sellers lives and writes poetry in Young Harris, a small college town in the mountains of north Georgia. She is best known for her poems about life in southern Appalachia. Although Sellers was reared in the Piedmont region, near Griffin, her grandmother grew up in north Georgia’s Nacoochee Valley. This heritage stimulated Sellers’s interest in Appalachia. After earning a B.A. from LaGrange College in 1958 and an M.A. from the University of Georgia in 1966, she accepted a position as professor of English at Young Harris College. After thirty-two years of service to the college, Sellers retired in 1997....

Celestine Sibley, a renowned southern author, journalist, and syndicated columnist, reported for the Atlanta Constitution from 1941 to 1999. Over her long career, she wrote more than ten thousand columns and many news stories of astonishing range, dealing with such varied topics as politics and key lime pie. Sibley was one of the most popular and long-running columnists for the Constitution, and her well-written and poignant essays on southern culture made her an icon in the South. Regarded by her colleagues as a reporting legend, Sibley was also the accomplished author of nearly thirty books published between 1958 and 1997....

Though all of her eighteen books have been set in Georgia or concern southerners living elsewhere, Anne Rivers Siddons is best known for books about Atlanta and its environs. Two novels, Homeplace (1987) and Nora, Nora (2000), take place in a fictionalized version of her hometown, Fairburn, southwest of Atlanta. She is also the author of two books of nonfiction, Go Straight on Peachtree (1978), a McDonald City Guide to Atlanta, and John Chancellor Makes Me Cry (1975), a series of essays patterned around the changing seasons in Atlanta. Most important, her novel Downtown (1994) recreates her early career as...

A Georgia-born poet, novelist, and short-story writer, Charlie Smith is a frequent contributor to national literary journals and periodicals, including Poetry, the Paris Review, and the New Yorker. Equally adept at poetry and fiction, Smith is a master of notable lyrical description, sensory detail, and candor. In five novels, three novellas, and five collections of poetry, Smith balances the loneliness and bleakness of his characters’ lives with the beauty and transcendence of the natural world.

Charlie Smith, son of Georgia legislator Charlie O. Smith Sr. and Jeanette Early Smith, was born June 27, 1947, in Moultrie, Georgia. Educated at Phillips...

Lillian Smith was one of the first prominent white southerners to denounce racial segregation openly and to work actively against the entrenched and often brutally enforced world of Jim Crow. From as early as the 1930s, she argued that Jim Crow was evil (“Segregation is spiritual lynching,” she said) and that it leads to social moral retardation.

Smith gained national recognition — and regional denunciation — by writing Strange Fruit (1944), a bold novel of illicit interracial love. Five years later she hurled another thunderbolt against racism in Killers of the Dream (1949), a brilliant psychological and autobiographical work warning...

In hindsight, the controversy that greeted the publication of Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit in 1944 seems unusually heated today. This novel of interracial love was denounced in many places for its “obscenity,” although sex is barely mentioned. Massachusetts banned it for a short time; so did the U.S. Post Office. But the book has had many admirers in the years since its publication. It was a commercial success — a best-seller, a Broadway play briefly — and it remains in print in many languages. From her home atop Old Screamer Mountain near Clayton, Georgia, Smith knew that many of her...

The first novel by Vereen Bell, Swamp Water was published initially in serial form in the Saturday Evening Post in November and December 1940, and then in book form by Little, Brown in February 1941. It was an immediate sensation in the South and across the nation. Bell, a native of Cairo, Georgia, edited American Boy-Youth’s Companion during the late 1930s, and returned home in 1940 to write fiction full-time. Swamp Water made him a wealthy man. The narrative, which concerns the exploits of a young boy, his hunting dog, and a fugitive hiding out in the Okefenokee Swamp, was...

During the middle of the nineteenth century, William Tappan Thompson gained national popularity as a writer of humorous stories. He was best known for creating the fictional character Major Joseph Jones, a down-to-earth Georgia planter who wrote dialect letters about his courtship, rural life, and travels. These letters, originally appearing in periodicals that Thompson edited, were published in Major Jones’s Courtship and Major Jones’s Sketches of Travel. Thompson was one of a group of nineteenth-century southern writers whose humorous and realistic tales about the backwoods produced a literature that was distinctively American.

Thompson was born August 31, 1812, in Ravenna,...

Physician, poet, and horticulturist, Francis “Frank” Ticknor wrote memorable Civil War poetry and earned a lasting literary reputation on the merit of a single poem, “Little Giffen,” a ballad about a young Tennessee soldier named Isaac Newton Giffen. The poem describes how during the war Dr. Ticknor treated and befriended the wounded Confederate lad, only to see him return to the ranks and presumably to his battlefield death.

Francis Ticknor, the youngest of Orray and Harriot Coolidge Ticknor’s three children, was born in Fortville, Georgia. He earned a medical degree from the Philadelphia College of Medicine in 1842 and began...

Although Erskine Caldwell wrote more than sixty books, twenty-five novels among them, he is best known for two works of long fiction, Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933). Tobacco Road was named one of the Modern Library’s one hundred best novels of the twentieth century. Along with the less well-known Journeyman (1935), these books make up a seriocomic trilogy of Georgia life in the first half of the twentieth century. They detail the ruination of the land, the growth of textile mills, and the abiding influence of fundamentalist religion in the South. They present a radical contrast to...

Jean Toomer is best known as the author of the 1923 novel Cane, an influential work about African American life in which Toomer drew largely on his experiences in Hancock County. Toomer wrote Cane after he left his home in Washington, D.C., and worked briefly as a substitute principal at a black industrial school in the middle Georgia town of Sparta. There he experienced a creative outpouring of poetry, drama, stories, and sketches that formed Cane, a narrative that begins in the rural South, switches to the urban North, and returns to the South for its conclusion. “Sempter,” the southern...

Every other year a board of judges awards the Townsend Prize for Fiction to an outstanding novel or short-story collection published by a Georgia writer during the past two years. The award is named for Jim Townsend, the founding editor of Atlanta magazine, the associate editor of Atlanta Weekly Magazine (of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution), and an early mentor to such Atlanta writers as Pat Conroy, Terry Kay, Bill Diehl, and Anne Rivers Siddons.

The prize was conceived by a group of Atlanta writers in 1981. From 1981 to 1997 Georgia State University sponsored the award. In 1997 Georgia Perimeter College...

Lamar Trotti was one of the most prolific and respected screenwriters and producers working in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s. Although he earned fame and fortune far from his native Georgia, he never relinquished his love for the South and its history. One of the most famous films that Trotti wrote and produced, I’d Climb the Highest Mountain (1951), was filmed on location in north Georgia and starred Susan Hayward. Before shooting began, Trotti assured the local people that the “picture would poke no ‘Tobacco Road’ fun” at them — a statement that could not be made about the...

Joseph Addison Turner was a writer, editor, publisher, lawyer, and planter. He is best known for publishing The Countryman, a weekly newspaper produced from his Putnam County plantation during the Civil War (1861–65). Despite previous publishing failures, Turner’s Countryman generated a wide southern readership during its four-year existence.

Born on September 23, 1826, in Putnam County, Turner was the son of William (“Honest Billy”) Turner and Lucy Wingfield Butler. At seven years old, he suffered a bone infection that left him crippled for life and kept him homebound for several years. As a result, Turnwold, the Turner family home...

Alfred Uhry, a playwright, lyricist, and screenwriter, is best known for his play Driving Miss Daisy, which premiered in New York in 1987 and was later adapted into a film. Uhry has received a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award, and several Tony Awards for his work — the only playwright to win all three awards.

Alfred Fox Uhry was born in Atlanta on December 3, 1936, to a prosperous family of German-Jewish descent. He attended Druid Hills High School, and after graduation he attended Brown University in Rhode Island, where he received a degree in English and drama in 1958....

The Uncle Remus tales are African American trickster stories about the exploits of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and other “creeturs” that were recreated in black regional dialect by Joel Chandler Harris (1845–1908). Harris, a native of Eatonton, was a literary comedian, New South journalist, amateur folklorist, southern local-color writer, and children’s author.

Two-thirds of Harris’s celebrated trickster tales — which constitute the largest gathering of African American folktales published in the nineteenth century — derive their deep structures and primary motifs from African folktales that were brought to the New World and then retold and elaborated upon by African...

The Violent Bear It Away is a novel written by Flannery O’Connor, one of Georgia’s most distinguished writers of the twentieth century. O’Connor was born in Savannah and lived most of her life in the central Georgia town of Milledgeville. When she wrote The Violent Bear It Away, O’Connor was living with her mother on a dairy farm called Andalusia, near Milledgeville. She began the novel in the summer of 1952, and it was published in 1960. The book’s debut received mixed reviews because critics found it difficult to understand, but it is now considered a classic of American literature....

A noted biographer, essayist, and literary-review editor, John Donald Wade is best remembered for his participation in the Vanderbilt Agrarian movement of the 1930s and especially his contribution to the symposium that was to become that movement’s manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930). Wade, a Macon County native who spent much of his life in Georgia, was not as prolific as some of his Agrarian colleagues, notably Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, and as a result did not attain their fame. Still, he exerted an influence over the...

Alice Walker is an African American novelist, short-story writer, poet, essayist, and activist. Her most famous novel, The Color Purple, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983. Walker’s creative vision is rooted in the economic hardship, racial terror, and folk wisdom of African American life and culture, particularly in the rural South. Her writing explores multidimensional kinships among women and embraces the redemptive power of social and political revolution.

Walker began publishing her fiction and poetry during the latter years of the Black Arts movement in the 1960s. Her work, along with that of such...

A native of north Georgia, Don West achieved success as one of the foremost southern regional poets of the twentieth century. He was at different times a labor organizer, political radical, preacher, progressive educator, and outspoken spokesperson for human equality in the generation before the civil rights movement. Although he is best known for his literary works, West was also an effective proponent of the Social Gospel, embraced by some of the South’s most dedicated religious reformers.

Born in 1906 in Devil’s Hollow, near Ellijay in Gilmer County, Donald L. West grew to young adulthood in the north Georgia mountains....

Bailey White first achieved popularity reading her local color essays on National Public Radio. Her distinctive, gravelly voice and her gift for portraying eccentric people and unusual situations with a gently self-deprecating wit won her a national following. White has published two essay collections (Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Sleeping at the Starlite Hotel) and one novel (Quite a Year for Plums), and her work has appeared as well in numerous periodicals. Her oral and written stories evoke a vivid picture of life in south Georgia.

White was born in 1950 in Thomasville. Both of her parents influenced her...

A native of Atlanta, Walter White served as chief secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) from 1929 to 1955. During the twenty-five years preceding the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, White was one of the most prominent African American figures and spokespeople in the country. Upon his death in 1955, the New York Times eulogized him as “the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington.”

White was the fourth of seven children of Madeline Harrison and George White, a teacher and postal worker, respectively....

Philip Lee Williams is an award-winning novelist who has spent his entire life in Georgia. He is the author of nine novels, two memoirs, and a children’s book. Also a widely published poet, he founded and edited the poetry journal Ataraxia.

Born in Madison in 1950, Williams has lived nearly all of his life in and around Athens. He received an A.B. degree in journalism from the University of Georgia in 1972 and began his career working for newspapers. From 1974 to 1978 he served as associate editor of the Madisonian and from 1978 to 1985 as managing editor and...

Calder Willingham was an accomplished novelist, playwright, and screenwriter who created some of the most memorable characters in the American cinematic and literary canons. Characterized by raw sexual overtones, several of Willingham’s novels are set in the South, with Georgia providing the backdrop for two of his novels, Eternal Fire and Rambling Rose.

Born in Atlanta on December 23, 1922, Calder Baynard Willingham grew up in Rome. Upon graduating from high school, he enrolled briefly at the Citadel, a military college in Charleston, South Carolina. His experience there provided him with fodder for his first novel, End as a Man....

Few novels have captured the popular American imagination more strongly than Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 book, Gone With the Wind. Its sweeping, romantic story of the South and the Civil War has entranced readers since the day of its publication. Many readers, however, especially African Americans, have complained that the novel is one-sided. They say that it demeans the role of blacks and that its portrayals of such characters as Mammy and Prissy are racist stereotypes. For them, Gone With the Wind has little to tell us about the real experiences of African Americans in the South during and after the...

One of two novels by Georgia writer Flannery O’Connor (1925–64), Wise Blood is a masterpiece of allegory and farce (a blending of humor and tragedy). O’Connor takes issue with a world in which Jesus is but another moral man, in which the Incarnation is valid only to the unintellectual, and in which people can — through their own actions or natural goodness — save themselves. Published in 1952, Wise Blood is a compelling portrait of isolated characters in their search for spiritual truth. A film adaptation, directed by John Huston and filmed in Georgia, was released in 1979.

The...

Frank Yerby rose to fame as a writer of popular fiction tinged with a distinctive southern flavor. He was the first African American to write a best-selling novel and to have a book purchased by a Hollywood studio for a film adaptation. During his prolific career, Yerby wrote thirty-three novels and sold more than fifty-five million hardback and paperback books worldwide.

Frank Garvin Yerby was born in Augusta on September 5, 1916, to Wilhemenia and Rufus Yerby. His mother was Scots-Irish and his father African American. He graduated from Haines Institute (1933) and Paine College (1937), both located in Augusta....