Author Appearances | Georgia Literary Festival
Georgia Top 25 Reading List | Lindberg Award
Letters About Literature | River of Words
Georgia Literary Resources
Past Projects
|
|
|
|
| ||||||||
Georgia Literary ResourcesGeorgia's history is filled with writers of note, and the contemporary literary community around the state bursts with highly regarded writers of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. To help provide readers and interested persons with some background on many of Georgia's writers, we offer the following brief author profiles with suggestions for where to seek additional information.
Roy Blount Jr.Roy Blount Jr. ranks high among America's most accomplished humorists, combining the wit of sophistication with laughter rooted in his Southern past, and he has been compared - favorably - with Mark Twain. Blount's career has been anything but limited: he has been a journalist, editor, essayist, novelist, dramatist, lecturer, musician, songwriter and national radio celebrity. His published work includes 17 books, covering topics from pro football to Robert E. Lee, from Jimmy Carter to the nation's first female President. Significantly, one of the volumes to his credit is the appropriately titled, Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor (1994) a collection that showcases the comic impulse from George Washington Harris and Twain to Jerry Clower and Memphis Minnie. Blount was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1941, but grew up in Decatur, Ga., where his father was a prominent civic figure. Blount recalls "wearing a gray cap and running around pretending to shoot Yankees," providing a foretaste of his later interest in writing a biography of the Confederate general, Robert E. Lee (2003). He was graduated with honors from Vanderbilt University and received a master's degree at Harvard before serving in the Army 1964-66. He was a sportswriter for the Atlanta newspaper and part-time teacher at Georgia State University. He was a staff writer for Sports Illustrated 1968-1975 and has been a freelance writer ever since, dividing his time between an apartment in New York City and western Massachusetts. His first book, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load (1974), examined in uproarious, revealing prose a year in the life of the Pittsburgh Steelers pro football team. His second book, which many consider his best, Crackers (1980), looked at the foibles of the South under the broad umbrella of the Carter administration. It was followed by several collections of humorous short essays. His first novel, First Hubby (1990), imagined the reversal of gender roles in the White House, and his personal memoir, Be Sweet (1998), looked back on his life with honest sentiment and a wry eye. When he's not writing, Blount may often be heard and seen on national programs such as Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion and The David letterman Show. He has written about presidential elections, the civil rights movement, played in a band with other authors including Stephen King and Dave Barry, done a one-man show on the New York stage, been in films and written a screenplay (Larger Than Life starring Bill Murray) and been contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly.
Pat ConroyPat Conroy is certainly the best-known of contemporary Georgia authors. While writing novels that describe quintessential dysfunctional families with bitter humor and often a sense of Olympian tragedy, Conroy himself seems to have lived a life of scarcely less upheaval with three marriages, various literary feuds and a willingness to speak out in behalf of liberal issues. He has become, however, one of America's most popular authors, in demand around the country for his books and his public appearances. Born in 1945 in Atlanta, Conroy was the first of seven children, a military brat whose father - a man whose violent outbursts against his family were memorably recorded in the 1976 novel The Great Santini - moved the family to many bases around the South. He finished his education at Beaufort High School in South Carolina and then attended The Citadel, which became the subject of his 1980 novel, The Lords of Discipline. His next and most successful novel, The Prince of Tides, appeared in 1986 and - like his other books - was turned into a major studio film. Conroy's novel Beach Music (1995) only burnished his bestselling author status, though there were some critical complaints that the book was over-written, a criticism the author has encountered throughout his later career. Most readers, however, find his storytelling genius, however sometimes elongated, to bear eloquent testimony to deep emotions and knowledge of his characters. His other books include The Boo, an initially self-published (1970) tribute to a beloved teacher at The Citadel and written while he was a student there; The Water is Wide (1972), a vivid account of his unconventional and abbreviated teaching career on South Carolina's mostly black Daufuskie Island; and most recently My Losing Season (2002), a remembrance of his senior year experiences on the basketball team at The Citadel. Conroy currently makes his home on Fripp Island, SC. He is married to the novelist Cassandra King (Sandra Conroy). More information on Pat Conroy
James DickeyJames Dickey was a formidable and controversial figure in the American world of letters in the second half of the 20th century. The Atlanta native's most important work was in poetry, though his 1970 novel Deliverance, in which four men confront the savagery of nature on the wild waters of Georgia's Chattooga River, is unquestionably his most widely known book. He is respected also for his essays and criticism as well as for his public celebration of poetry in which Dickey himself frequently became the central figure. His work is highly personal and visceral, examining with sustained narrative power the relationship between man and the natural world. He died in early 1997. Born in Atlanta in 1923, Dickey was one of the "Buckhead Boys" he celebrated in one of his poems. He dropped out of Clemson and joined the Army Air Corps in 1942, and his war experiences - whether real or exaggerated - provide the basis for some of his most gripping poetry. After getting a degree at Vanderbilt, he taught English for several years and worked at an Atlanta advertising firm, writing his poetry after office hours ("Selling his soul to the devil in the daytime and buying it back at night," is the way Dickey put it). His first volume of poetry, Into the Stone and Other Poems was published in 1960 and led him to return to teaching and writing. Buckdancer's Choice won the National Book Award in 1966. In 1967, he was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the equivalent of Poet Laureate today). The following year he was hired as professor of English and writer-in-residence at the University of South Carolina, and he remained on the faculty there until his death. Deliverance and the movie (for which he was screenwriter) brought him fame and money, and for the rest of his life he was a writer around whom almost mythic tales of sometimes outrageous behavior regularly erupted. He was a popular and inspirational teacher whose students included Pat Conroy. His poetry collected in Poems: 1957-1967 (1967) brings together what most critics feel is his best work, though he continued to produce many volumes of poetry, fiction, criticism and several "coffee table" books. Among his best-known poems are "May Day Sermon," "Cherrylog Road," "The Firebombing" and "Falling," a riveting narrative, based on a true incident, in which the poet imagines the death of a stewardess falling from her plane through space to her death. His later novels include Alnilam (1987) and To the White Sea (1993). A recent collection, James Dickey: Classes on Modern Poets and the Art of Poetry (2004) offers insight into Dickey's classroom lectures. He died in 1997 after years of largely self-inflicted health problems including alcoholism. More information on James Dickey:
Joel Chandler HarrisJoel Chandler Harris was one of the South's preeminent journalists in the latter years of the 19th century and also one of its most creative and enduring storytellers. His folktales featuring a likable black character named Uncle Remus gave him national prominence, while he was remembered for his progressive social views. His fully restored Victorian home in Atlanta, Wren's Nest, is open to the public and offers a permanent reminder of his lasting achievements in both literature and journalism. Born in 1845 in Eatonton and blessed with a love of books, Harris worked during the Civil War years as a printing compositor for a country newspaper printed at a plantation near his home. There he found encouragement for writing and reading and also heard and absorbed stories told by slaves on the plantation. He began working for weekly newspapers after the war and in 1870 became associate editor at the Savannah Morning News. There he produced a series of widely distributed columns focusing on human interest items and the state's changing political climate. When a yellow fever epidemic hit Savannah in 1876, he moved his family to Atlanta and was hired by the Atlanta Constitution. Harris quickly became a respected and popular chronicler of the evolving post-war South, writing about politics and social customs. He also put together a collection of heard stories and folktales into his first book, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, published in 1880. For nearly a quarter of a century he would continue as the associate editor of the Atlanta paper and an increasingly busy author of fiction, folk tales and children's books. Among his many books, Harris published six collections of Uncle Remus stories, of which the most highly regarded is Told by Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (1905). He was friends with Mark Twain, and the two men were charter members of the American Folklore Society in 1888. Harris was a major influence in the publishing of local dialect tales in the late 19th and early 20th century and drew later tributes from writers as diverse as Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O'Connor and Rudyard Kipling. His writing is not without criticism, however, particularly from some African Americans who argue that his work wrongfully appropriated plantation slave images and language. In his last years, Harris was a national figure of renown, honored by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, and was named to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. At his death in 1908, obituary writers characterized him as "the most beloved man in America." He is buried in Westview Cemetery in Atlanta. For more information on Joel Chandler Harris:
Terry KayTerry Kay, with his familiar white beard and avuncular expression, could be mistaken for anyone's lovable uncle - if that uncle could write like one of the finest authors in America, that is. Kay, born in Hart County in 1938, the eleventh of 12 children, has earned an enviable reputation not just in Georgia but around the country for his artistry with the written word and his generosity of spirit. He has published nearly a dozen books in different genres, been translated into numerous foreign languages, written original plays and produced a solid body of journalistic criticism. He remains one of the state's most accessible and endearing authors. His best-known book, To Dance with the White Dog (1990) - the gentle, heartwarming story of an octogenarian and the mysterious white dog that comes to live with him after the death of his wife - has become a Southern classic. Based on Kay's own parents, the novel won Kay several awards and was chosen among the 25 books for all Georgians to read by the Georgia Center for the Book. It also was turned into an award-winning movie for CBS television. Kay grew up on a farm and began his writing career in journalism, working for the Atlanta newspapers as a sportswriter and film and drama critic. He later worked in public relations before leaving the corporate world in 1989 to devote his full time to writing. His first novel, The Years the Lights Came On (1976), was inspired by the coming of electricity to his rural community. Two dark, violent novels followed, After Eli in 1981 and Dark Thirty in 1984. Kay published a children's book, To Whom the Angel Spoke, in 1991, and followed that with the novel Shadow Song (1995), a love story set in Catskill Mountains where the author worked as a waiter in a Jewish resort. In 1999, he wrote a mystery set in Atlanta, The Kidnapping of Aaron Greene and in 2000, Taking Lottie Home, perhaps the author's personal favorite among his books. Other books include Special Kay: The Wisdom of Terry Kay (2000) and The Valley of Light (2003). Terry Kay lives with his wife of 44 years near Athens, Ga.
Judson MitchamJudson Mitcham has published prize-winning works in fiction and poetry and is acclaimed as a teacher of both creative writing and psychology. A Georgia native, his work has been grounded in the landscapes of the state, and his work unites a strong narrative element with an elegiac personal voice. His best-known books, a pair of novels, offer distinctive narrators - an aging sharecropper in The Sweet Everlasting, and a curious young boy in Sabbath Creek - and a quiet but revealing sequence of events that look into the past, evoking a powerful sense of memory and loss. Mitcham was born in 1948 in Monroe, an area of Georgia that has figured prominently in much of his writing. He got his doctorate in psychology at the University of Georgia and since then has taught at Fort Valley State University, where he is now chair of the psychology department. He also has taught creative writing at several institutions including the University of Georgia and Emory University. He has moved easily between fiction and poetry, explaining to interviewers in 2003, "I have always written narrative poems, so the progression to prose fiction was a natural one . I hope to produce fiction that shares the characteristic of good poetry - freshness and economy of language, mystery within clarity; a sense of rightness, of necessity." His first book of poetry, Somewhere in Ecclesiastes, a series of first-person narratives focusing on family, relationships and mortality, was published in 1991. It won the Devin Poetry Award, and the author was named Georgia Author of the Year. His eloquent first novel, The Sweet Everlasting (1996), in which 74-year-old Ellis Burt recalls his life as a sharecropper's son in rural Georgia, received the Townsend Award, and for the second time he was chosen as Georgia Author of the Year. Mitcham's second volume of poetry, This April Day (2002) was followed by his second novel, Sabbath Creek (2004), about the unlikely relationship between a young white boy and an elderly black man. Critics hailed the book as a worthy successor to his prize-winning first novel. For more information about Judson Mitcham, see:
Margaret MitchellMargaret Mitchell wrote only one book, Gone With the Wind, in 1936, but it became the best-selling novel of all time in America. It also earned her a popularity she never sought and a celebrity she shunned. Amid unprecedented national publicity, her book was made into one of the best-known and enduring of all films, a 1939 movie starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh that had its world premiere in Atlanta Dec. 15, 1939. Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta in 1900 into a family whose members had played roles in the American Revolution, uprisings in Ireland and the Civil War. Stories of these adventures intrigued the young Margaret who first heard about the Confederacy from aunts and uncles. She went off to college at Smith in the fall of 1918, but her fiancé was killed during World War I, and when her mother died, she returned to Atlanta to look after the household. Always a free spirit, she lived what many saw as a Bohemian life in the early 1920s, marrying an ex-football player and bootlegger. Their marriage was short lived, and she soon found a more lasting relationship with John Marsh, an Atlanta newspaperman. She had been writing for the Atlanta Journal, but quit that job while recuperating from a series of injuries. It was during that time that she began work on the manuscript that eventually would become Gone With the Wind. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1937, becoming the only second Georgia writer to win that honor (following Caroline Miller for Lamb in His Bosom in 1934). She died in a traffic accident in Atlanta in 1949 and is buried with her family in Oakland Cemetery. Readers interested in the author also should read Margaret Mitchell's 'Gone With the Wind Letters, 1936-1949 edited by Richard Harwell. More information Margaret Mitchell and Gone With the Wind.
Flannery O'ConnorFlannery O'connor lived for only 39 years, but her literary reputation has grown in the years since her death, marking her now among the 20th century's most important American writers. Best known for her short stories, she also wrote novels and essays before her death from lupus in 1964. Her God-haunted stories, bringing together her strong Catholic beliefs with the Southern gothic evangels she observed, generate grotesquely comic and absurd effects which serve on another level as an examination of her faith. Born in Savannah in 1925, Mary Flannery O'Connor (she dropped the "Mary" after college in 1945 because it sounded insufficiently authorial) spent most of her life at her mother's ancestral family farm, Andalusia, located between Milledgeville and Eatonton in Baldwin County. She was graduated from Georgia State College for Women and studied writing in Iowa and New York for several years until she was stricken with lupus on a visit back home in 1950. She remained at Andalusia, writing two novels and 32 stories while battling the disease for the rest of her life. Her first novel, Wise Blood, was published in 1952. The book examines the bizarre relationship between a licentious young woman, a conniving widow and a young man who deliberately blinds himself to establish the "Church of Truth Without Jesus Christ Crucified." A Good Man is Hard to Find, her first collection of short stories, appeared in 1955, followed by a second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960) and a story collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965, posthumous). The Complete Stories, published seven years after her death in 1971, received the National Book Award. Other books of note: Mystery and Manners (1965), a posthumous collection of O'Connor's nonfiction prose, and The Habit of Being (1979), a generous collection of O'Connor's correspondence. For more information about Flannery O'Connor, see:
Karin SlaughterKarin Slaughter has written four suspense novels, each brimming with scenes of violence and cruelty. Women are often the targets of the grisly passages, suffering mutilation, rape, murder and related mayhem. "I'm more interested in what motivates people to do violence rather than the violence itself," Slaughter says. "If you're going to write in a serious way about violence against women or violence against children, to gloss over it does a disservice to every9ne. My readers know what they're getting." When she's not writing a novel - she's produced four in four years - she prefers Renaissance literature and the likes of Emily Bronte and Flannery O'Connor. Born in Jonesboro in 1971, Slaughter wrote and illustrated her first book at the age of 6, "and since then my life has been about writing and getting published." She pursued an education in 16th and 17th century literature but dropped out of Georgia State University when she learned she had to take too many classes in math. A variety of jobs including running her own sign company followed before she broke into publishing in 2001 with her first novel, Blindsighted. It became the first in a series set in fictional Grant County, Georgia, modeled somewhat loosely on several middle Georgia towns and featuring a recurring cast of three characters: Sara, a pediatrician and county coroner; Sara's ex-husband Jeffrey, chief of police; and Lena Adams, a troubled detective. Blindsighted was followed by the novels Kisscut in 2002, A Fair Cold Fear in 2003 and Indelible in 2004. Also in 2004, Slaughter edited Like a Charm, a novel with 15 different authors contributing a connected chapter. With a growing national readership, good reviews and a seven-figure deal for overseas editions of her books, Slaughter seems assured of a prominent place in contemporary American fiction. She lives in Atlanta. More information on Karin Slaughter.
John StoneJohn Stone has been hailed as the Renaissance man of medicine. A long-time professor of medicine at Emory University, a cardiologist and the author and editor of medical texts, Stone also is a poet of distinction. In his five volumes of poetry published through 2004, Stone has produced poems that crackle with wit and lyric human expression. His most widely known books, however, are essay collections, In the Country of Hearts (1990) and On Doctoring (1991), both of which examine the relationship of literature and medicine, connecting the heart and the mind. Copies of the latter book now are distributed to incoming students at schools of medicine across the United States. Stone was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1936, but spent much of his youth growing up in Texas. He finished high school in Jackson and recalls a literary competition at his school newspaper in which he was asked to find a judge. "I took the entries to a very nice lady who lived not too far away who had offered to judge them," he said. "It was a decade later before I realized that nice woman was Eudora Welty." With degrees in English and medicine, Stone completed a residency in cardiology at Emory and joined the medical school faculty at there in 1969. He retired in 2003 after more than 30 years service. Three times he was named recipient of teaching awards. Stone's first book of poetry, The Smell of Matches, was published in 1972 and was honored by the Georgia Writers Association. He subsequently has received awards from writers'organizations in Georgia and Mississippi. His other poetry books include In All This Rain (1980), Renaming the Streets (1985), Where Water Begins: New Poems and Prose (1998) and Music From Apartment 8: New and Selected Poems (2004). Summing up Stone's work, Georgia Poet Laureate David Bottoms wrote, "To enter Stone's poetry is to enter the territory of the heart . Reading the poems of John Stone is like getting a house call from an eminent physician of the spirit." For more information on John Stone: New Georgia Encyclopedia
Philip Lee WilliamsPhilip Lee Williams has been one of Georgia's best-known and most prolific writers since the appearance of his first book in 1986, The Heart of a Distant Forest. He has published 11 more books of fiction and nonfiction while continuing to write poetry and both music and lyrics (see his 1997 novel Jenny Dorset). His subjects have ranged from essays about his open-heart surgery (in Crossing Wildcat Ridge, 1999) to a novel set in 18th century Charleston (Jenny Dorset) to a mystery novel featuring an ex-baseball player-turned private eye (Slow Dance in Autumn, 1988). While he writes easily in many styles and genres, Williams says his introspective characters are usually people living on the margins of society, displaced and searching to better understand themselves. "I've always been better at character development than plotting," he says. Williams was born in 1950 in Athens and moved to Madison in 1953 where he grew up. He received a degree in journalism from the University of Georgia and was a for a time a newspaper editor. He has worked at the University of Georgia in several capacities including teaching a popular creative writing course. The Heart of a Distant Forest, which examines an old man's death with insight and compassion, won the Townsend Prize as the best work of fiction by a Georgia writer. His fourth novel, The Song of Daniel (1990) won Williams the Georgia Writer of the Year award. By his own admission his most ambitious novel and one of his personal favorites, Jenny Dorset, a picaresque tale of a high-spirited young woman in colonial South Carolina, was his first foray into historical fiction, a genre he successfully entered again with his Civil War-era novel A Distant Flame (2004). In the nonfiction The Silent Stars Go By (1998), Williams wrote nostalgically about a country Christmas of his youth, while in the earlier Final Heat (1992), set in Mississippi, he wrote in a violent Southern gothic style about characters seemingly suited to an Erskine Caldwell novel. Continuing to write both fiction and nonfiction, Williams lives with his family south of Watkinsville in southern Oconee County. In spite of his output and his awards, the self-effacing Williams does not enjoy the widespread public recognition of some other Georgia writers. "I am shy and a bit agoraphobic, and I haven't been as relentless in pushing myself as I should have," he acknowledged in 2004. "I guess I've always had faith that, in the end, someone will come along and properly assess my career and write about me . Still, I'm proud of what I've done and have never sought fame." For more information on Philip Lee Williams: New Georgia Encyclopedia
For more information on these projects, or on the Georgia Center for the Book, contact at 404-370-8450 ext 2225, or via E-mail. © 2004, Georgia Center for the Book
|
