Fiction
Sub-Topics
The New Georgia Encyclopedia is supported by funding from A More Perfect Union, a special initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
William Walsh's award-winning book of poetry, Fly Fishing in Times Square (2020), centers on themes of place and memory as the speaker seeks to reconcile their past and present.
Courtesy of William Walsh
Author, professor, and editor William Walsh is known for his work as a southern narrative poet and as an interviewer of contemporary authors.
Courtesy of William Walsh
William Walsh's second book, Lost in the White Ruins (2014), examines childhood, regrets of loss, and the search "to find what makes us whole."
Courtesy of William Walsh
William Walsh's first novel, Lakewood, was published in 2022.
Courtesy of William Walsh
Environmental concerns figure prominently in the work of Georgia author Taylor Brown.
Photograph by Benjamin Galland
Taylor Brown's first novel, Fallen Land (2016), follows two youths as they travel from Virginia to the Georgia coast during the Civil War.
St. Martin's Press
Taylor Brown's fourth novel, Pride of Eden (2020), takes place in an animal sanctuary on the Georgia coast and explores the plight of wild animals in the modern world.
St. Martin's Press
Shay Younblood is pictured at a Yaddo artist residency in Saratoga Springs, New York. A graduate of Clark College (later Clark Atlanta University), Youngblood has received numerous honors, including a Pushcart Prize, a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, and several NAACP Theater Awards.
Courtesy of Shay Youngblood, Photograph by Carol Bullard.
Shay Youngblood, from Columbus, writes novels, plays, and shorts stories that center on the lives of Black women. Her plays have been staged in theaters across the country, including numerous productions in Atlanta.
Courtesy of Shay Youngblood, Photograph by Miriam Phields.
Michael Bishop was named to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2018.Â
Like many of Bishop's works, the 1985 novel Ancient of Days is set in Georgia.Â
The Secret Ascension: Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas (1987) imagines a parallel universe in which President Richard Nixon, serving his fourth term, has turned the country into a totalitarian police state.
Augusta native Frank Yerby came to be known as "king of the costume novel" for his successful works of historical fiction.Â
Courtesy of Digital Library of Georgia, Georgia Historic Newspapers.
Sue Monk Kidd is the author of multiple novels, including The Secret Life of Bees and The Invention of Wings.
In this photograph, taken by George N. Barnard, Union general William T. Sherman sits astride his horse at Federal Fort No. 7 in Atlanta. Sherman's Atlanta campaign, which lasted through the spring and summer of 1864, resulted in the fall of the city on September 2.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Photograph by George N. Barnard, #LC-DIG-cwpb-03628.
Five enslaved people are pictured at Turnwold Plantation, the Eatonton estate of Joseph Addison Turner. Writer Joel Chandler Harris, who lived at Turnwold during the Civil War, drew upon his experiences there to write his Uncle Remus tales, as well as his autobiographical novel On the Plantation.
Margaret Mitchell's epic Civil War love story, Gone With the Wind, was published in June 1936. Mitchell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in May 1937.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Philip Lee Williams, a native of Madison, won the 2004 Michael Shaara Prize for Civil War Fiction for his novel A Distant Flame (2004). The novel chronicles the experiences of protagonist Charlie Merrill before, during, and after the Atlanta campaign of 1864.
Title page of the original edition of Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice, a novel by Columbus native Augusta Jane Evans. Published in 1864, during the Civil War, the novel was sympathetic to the Confederate cause and redefined the roles available to Southern women during the war.
From Documenting the American South, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries
Augusta Jane Evans Wilson wrote nine novels 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.
Courtesy of State Archives of Alabama
Augusta Jane Evans, a native of Columbus, published Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice, in 1864, during the Civil War. In 1992 historian Drew Gilpin Faust edited a new edition of the text, restoring passages that had been dropped from reissues of the narrative.
Turnwold Plantation in Eatonton was the home of Joseph Addison Turner, who published a Confederate newspaper called The Countryman during the Civil War. It is also the setting of On the Plantation, a fictionalized account by Joel Chandler Harris of his experiences as a young typesetter at Turnwold.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
put168.
Marian McCamy Sims, a fiction writer, was a native of Dalton and an alumnae of Agnes Scott College in Decatur. Her novels and short stories, written in North Carolina during the 1930s and 1940s, focus primarily on the lives of white, middle-class southerners.
Reprinted by permission of University of North Carolina at Charlotte Library, Marian McCamy Sims Papers.
The family home of writer Marian McCamy Sims, pictured circa 1921, was built in Dalton around 1918. Originally located on South Thornton Avenue, the house was later moved to another site.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
wtf096.
Tayari Jones, an Atlanta native, writes short stories, articles, and novels, many of which focus on African American life in her hometown after the civil rights movement. A graduate of Spelman College, Jones has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Corporation of Yaddo, among others.
Photograph by Richard Powers
Leaving Atlanta, the debut novel of Atlanta native Tayari Jones, chronicles the child murders of 1979-81 in Atlanta's Black community. Told from the perspective of three elementary school children, the novel received several awards and honors, including the Lillian Smith Book Award in 2005.
The Untelling, published in 2005, is the second novel by Atlanta native Tayari Jones. Through a narrative focusing on a young African American woman's work among the poor in Atlanta, Jones explores the changing dynamics of race, class, and gender in the urban South.
After a career in journalism, Olive Ann Burns was inspired to write her first novel, Cold Sassy Tree, after being diagnosed with cancer in 1975. The book was published in 1984 by Ticknor and Fields; the cover of the 1986 paperback reprint by Dell is pictured.
Olive Ann Burns, a native of Banks County, began her writing career as a journalist for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution Magazine in 1946. She is best known for her novel Cold Sassy Tree (1984), which is set in the fictional town of Cold Sassy, Georgia, and draws upon Burns's family history.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Georgia native Calder Willingham, shown circa 1970, wrote novels, plays, and screenplays. His screenplay for The Graduate (1967), cowritten with Buck Henry, was nominated for an Academy Award. Willingham also wrote many other scripts, including The Strange One (1957), which was an adapation of his first novel, End as a Man (1947).
Photograph from Corbis
Ha Jin, a native of China's Liaoning Province, traveled to the United States in 1985 to pursue a doctorate in English. His first collection of poetry in English appeared in 1990, and since that time he has published additional collections of poems and short stories, as well as several novels. In 1993 Jin joined the creative writing faculty at Emory University, where he taught for ten years.
Photograph by Michael Romanos
The novelist Will Harben poses with Elizabeth, one of his three children, in 1915.
Courtesy of James Murphy
Will Harben, a Dalton native, achieved literary success by creating colorful characters based on the mountaineers of north Georgia.
Courtesy of James Murphy
The ancestral home of the Georgia novelist Will Harben is located at 306 Selvidge Street in Dalton.
Courtesy of James Murphy
Although novelist Will Harben spent most of his adult life in New York City, he always returned for a visit each summer to his native Dalton. Harben is quoted as saying, "I may live in the North, but my heart is in Dixie."
Courtesy of James Murphy
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet was the dean of the Georgia humorists. His book of humorous sketches, Georgia Scenes (1835), paved the way for other satirists, collectively known as the Georgia humorists.
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Georgia Photo File.
This illustration from the 1840 edition of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes depicts a young man practicing his technique for eye-gouging.
From Georgia Scenes, by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's vain and selfish character Evelina, illustrated here in the 1840 edition of Georgia Scenes, drives her husband to drink and dishonor in the literary sketch "The Charming Creature."
From Georgia Scenes, by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet
Writers Harry Crews and Paul Hemphill at Manuel's Tavern in Atlanta, 1979. Crews, author of the acclaimed memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place and numerous novels, wrote primarily about the poor white South. Often compared to such noted Georgia writers as Flannery O'Connor and James Dickey, Crews himself has been an important influence on many younger southern writers.
Courtesy of Special Collections & Archives, Georgia State University Library, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Photographic Archive.
James Alan McPherson attends a University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop class in 2005. McPherson, a Savannah native, was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize, awarded for his short story collection Elbow Room.
Photograph by Kirk Murray
Convicts work in unison on a Georgia chain gang in the early 1930s. John Spivak's original caption notes that "rhythmic movement is necessary to avoid injuring one another while bending or rising."
From Georgia Nigger, by J. L. Spivak
John Spivak was granted access to offical whipping reports, such as this one from Clarke County, while conducting research for his 1932 novel.
From Georgia Nigger, by J. L. Spivak
This portrait of John Oliver Killens, writer and founder of the Harlem Writers Guild, was photographed by Carl Van Vechten on June 8, 1954.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Photograph Collection.
Christ Church, on St. Simons Island, was rebuilt in 1884 by a young minister, Anson Dodge, in memory of his deceased wife.
Image from septicbreath
The fiction writer Eugenia Price is pictured with James Gould III outside St. Simons Lighthouse.
Courtesy of Coastal Georgia Historical Society.
Anson Green Phelps Dodge (left) with an unidentified minister in England. Dodge rebuilt Christ Church on St. Simons Island in the 1880s, and the lives of his family and the Gould family inspired the characters and stories in many of Eugenia Price's fictional works.
In preparing to write her best-selling novel, Gone With the Wind, Atlanta native Margaret Mitchell did extensive research on Georgia during the Civil War. She was influenced by Confederate veterans and others whose vivid memories of the period helped shape her narrative.
Margaret Mitchell, the author of the best-selling novel Gone With the Wind (1936), began writing stories and plays early in her life. As a teenager, she was a founding member and officer of her high school's drama club as well as the literary editor of the yearbook.
Courtesy of Atlanta History Center.
In 1922 Margaret Mitchell (sixth from left) married Berrien Kinnard Upshaw (center). Upshaw left after four months, and the couple's marriage was annulled two years later. John Marsh (second from left), whom Mitchell married in 1925, was Upshaw's best man.
Courtesy of Atlanta History Center.
Undated photograph of Margaret Mitchell, the author of the best-selling novel Gone With the Wind (1936), camping at Lake Burton in Rabun County.
Courtesy of Atlanta History Center.
During World War II (1941-45) Margaret Mitchell, the best-selling author of Gone With the Wind (1936), worked for the American Red Cross.
Courtesy of Atlanta History Center, Kenneth G. Rogerts Collection.
Atlanta author Margaret Mitchell, recognized on this 1986 Great Americans Series stamp, sold over 30 million copies of her novel, Gone With the Wind.
Courtesy of Smithsonian National Postal Museum
In 1922 Margaret Mitchell took a job, at a salary of $25 per week, as a writer for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. Mitchell left the paper in 1926 and began writing Gone With the Wind, which was published in 1936.
Courtesy of Atlanta History Center.
Carson McCullers, considered one of the most significant American writers of the twentieth century, is best known for her novels The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and The Member of the Wedding.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Photograph by Carl Van Vechten.
The third novel by Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1946, when the author was just twenty-eight years old.
Eatonton native Alice Walker's award-winning novel The Color Purple (1982) chronicles the self-empowerment and growth of the character Celie, a poor Black woman living in rural Georgia.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
On August 27, 2004, the crew prepares the set for the musical stage adaption of Alice Walker's The Color Purple. The production opened in September 2004 at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Jubilee (1966), the only novel published by poet Margaret Walker, was an influential work. It has been described as a neo-slave narrative.
Image from Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America
Jean Toomer is best known as the author of the 1923 novel Cane, set in small-town Georgia.
Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Libraries, Yale Collection of American Literature.
A young Jean Toomer, pictured around the turn of the twentieth century. Toomer was born in 1894 in Washington, D.C., and grew up there. His father was a Georgian and the widower of a wealthy Georgia landowner, Amanda America Dickson.
Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Libraries, Yale Collection of American Literature.
Jean Toomer's novel Cane was published in 1923. This masterpiece of the Modernist style was inspired by Toomer's visit to Georgia.
Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Libraries, Yale Collection of American Literature.
An award-winning writer, Pearl Cleage is known for exploring difficult or controversial subjects in her fiction and nonfiction works, including Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot (1993) and What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (1997).
In her novel I Wish I Had a Red Dress (2001), Pearl Cleage addresses the challenges modern-day Black women face.
Actors Phylicia Rashad and Mark Young portray the characters Angel and Guy in the Alliance Theatre's 1995 production of Blues for an Alabama Sky, written by Georgia playwright Pearl Cleage.
Photograph by Jennifer Lester
Ferrol Sams, a physician, was the author of seven books. His works are rooted in the oral traditions of southern humor and folklore.
Photograph from Emory University
At the age of thirty-nine, Flannery O'Connor died on August 3, 1964, of lupus, the disease that had also afflicted her father. She is buried in Memory Hill Cemetery in Milledgeville. The posthumous collection The Complete Stories received the National Book Award in 1972.
Courtesy of Ina Dillard Russell Library, Georgia College and State University
A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) is one of two collections of short fiction by Flannery O'Connor. The title story is about a middle-class Atlanta family murdered by a criminal on their way to a Florida vacation. Underneath the ordinary surfaces of modern life, O'Connor suggests, is a real and menacing evil that can intrude without warning.
Image from National Book Foundation
Grace Lumpkin published four novels in her lifetime. She is best known for her radical novels of the 1930s, To Make My Bread and A Sign for Cain, which address the economic and social turmoil of the Great Depression.
Courtesy of the University of South Carolina
A German edition of Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel, Gone With the Wind.
Renowned poet Byron Herbert Reece, a native of Dahlonega, attended Young Harris College, although he never completed a degree. Reece returned to the school as an instructor in the 1950s.
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Byron Herbert Reece Papers.
Byron Herbert Reece was the author of four books of poetry and two novels. When he wasn't busy writing or working on his family farm near Dahlonega, Reece served as writer-in-residence at the University of California at Los Angeles, Emory University, and Young Harris College.
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Byron Herbert Reece Papers.
Byron Herbert Reece, a poet from Union County, accepts an award from the Georgia Writers Association.
Byron Herbert Reece (right) is pictured with his father, Juan Reece (left), on the family farm near Blood Mountain above Dahlonega. Both Reece and his father contracted tuberculosis during their lives.
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Byron Herbert Reece Papers.
Blood Mountain, at 4,461 feet, is the highest peak along the Appalachian Trail in Georgia and the sixth highest mountain in the state. The mountain is located near the line between Union and Lumpkin counties and may have been named for a battle between the Cherokees and the Creeks.
Photograph by Sammy Hancock
Mary Hood's three collections of short stories, How Far She Went (1984), And Venus Is Blue (1986), and A Clear View of the Southern Sky (2015), have won several fiction awards. Her stories have been reprinted in numerous anthologies and textbooks.
Photograph by Erin R. McLeod, New Georgia Encyclopedia
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.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Alice Walker has written from a number of perspectives, exploring the nature of life for Black Americans in the modern world and examining the plight of women (especially women of color) in a male-dominated society.
Courtesy of Special Collections & Archives, Georgia State University Library, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Photographic Archive.
Raymond Andrews, pictured in 1991, 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.
Photograph by Alexa Kozak
An expansive, engaging man who made friends effortlessly, the writer Raymond Andrews was known for his encyclopedic knowledge of old movies and sports, especially football and baseball.
Courtesy of Emory University
Appalachee Red (1978), the first novel in the Muskhogean trilogy by Raymond Andrews, tells the story of a large, red-skinned Black man who changes everything for African Americans in the small town of Appalachee, which is based on the town of Madison.
From Appalachee Red, by R. Andrews
Cordele native Mac Hyman's internationally acclaimed comic novel, No Time for Sergeants, was published by Random House in 1953. The book's popularity inspired television, Broadway, and film adaptations.
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 (1939-69), Cheney published four novels that depict the social transformation of south Georgia between 1870 and 1960.
From River Rogue, by B. Cheney
The humorist Richard Malcolm Johnston wrote four novels and seven collections of stories, including his best-known work, Dukesborough Tales (1871).
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Georgia Photo File.
James Dickey played the role of a sheriff in the 1972 movie version of his novel Deliverance (1970), which starred Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight.
Courtesy of Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, James Dickey Papers.
Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty starred in the 1972 John Boorman film adaptation of James Dickey's Deliverance.
Photograph by Walt Jabsco
Soldier, editor, and politician Francis Fontaine is best known for his literary works. His narrative poem The Exile: A Tale of St. Augustine was published in 1878.
