Jericho Brown is an award-winning poet and creator of the “Duplex” form. In 2024 he won a coveted “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation.
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Jericho Brown's third collection, The Tradition (2019), finds the poet in full bloom as he works with existing and new forms to examine cycles of violence and terror, love and loss. The collection earned Brown a Pulitzer Prize in 2020.
Award-winning author and Poet Laureate of Georgia Chelsea Rathburn has served as an ambassador for the literary arts at events across the state. Since 2019, Rathburn has taught creative writing at Mercer University in Macon and continues to work actively in Georgia's literary community.
From Chelsea Rathburn
In her third collection of poems, Still Life with Mother and Knife (2019), Chelsea Rathburn navigates themes of women's sexuality, mental health, and healing from adolescence to adulthood. The collection was named one of the "Books All Georgians Should Read" by the Georgia Center for the Book and received the 2020 Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry.
From Chelsea Rathburn
Chelsea Rathburn's second book, A Raft of Grief (2013), was awarded the 2012 Autumn Press Poetry Prize. In this collection, Rathburn abandons iambics and rhyme in her exploration of personal themes such as marital dysfunction, alcoholism, self-reclamation, and love.
From Chelsea Rathburn
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
Alice Friman entered the Georgia literary scene in 2001 when she read her work for the Georgia Poetry Circuit. A prolific and accomplished writer, she has earned numerous awards including the Pushcart Prize and the Ezra Pound Poetry Award.
Photograph by Lillian Elaine Wilson
In her book The View From Saturn: Poems (2014), Alice Friman explores loss, existentialism, and the natural world.
Poet and Bozart Press publisher Ernest Hartsock was an important figure in Atlanta's literary community during the 1920s.
Courtesy of Philip Weltner Library, Oglethorpe University.
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.
Lauren Gunderson, from Decatur, is one of the most produced playwrights in the United States. Atlanta's Essential Theatre produced her first play when she was still in high school.
Anya Krugovoy Silver, a poet and longtime professor at Mercer University, was the author of four collections of poetry. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018.
Photograph from Mercer University
Silver's second book, I Watched You Disappear (2014), won the Georgia Author of the Year award for poetry.
Michael Bishop was named to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2018.
Like many of Bishop's works, the 1985 novel Ancient of Days is set in Georgia.
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.
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.
William Grimes wrote Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave. The first slave narrative printed in the U.S., it was published in New York City in 1825.
Photograph from Dwight C. Kilbourne, The Bench and Bar of Litchfield County, Connecticut, 1709-1909
This map of Savannah River-area rice plantations was created in 1825, the same year William Grimes first published his narrative in New York City. Grimes served six enslavers in Savannah between 1811 and 1815 before escaping to freedom in New England.
Chatham County Map Portfolio, compiled by workers of the Writers program of the Works Projects Administration in the State of Georgia. Sponsored by the Georgia Society of the Colonial Dames of America.
Carlotta O'Neill, the wife of playwright Eugene O'Neill, stands outside Casa Genotta, their home on Sea Island. The O'Neills built the house in 1932 and lived there until 1936.
Courtesy of National Park Service
Eugene O'Neill, a prominent playwright, and his wife, Carlotta, are pictured in a portrait by Carl Van Vechten in September 1933. In 1932 the O'Neills built a new home, Casa Genotta, on Sea Island and lived there until 1936. O'Neill wrote several plays during their residence, including his only comedy, Ah Wilderness!, and the first draft of A Touch of the Poet.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Photograph by Carl Van Vechten.
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.
Southern Poetry Review, one of the oldest literary journals in the Southeast, was founded in Florida in 1958 and has been based at Armstrong State University in Savannah since 2002. Pictured is the cover of the journal's fall 2006 issue, featuring a photograph by Dave Beckerman entitled The Secret Garden.
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.
Julian Harris, editor and co-owner, with his wife, Julia, of the Columbus Enquirer-Sun, reads mail at his desk in the late 1920s. Harris, the son of Georgia folklorist Joel Chandler Harris, and his wife jointly won a Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for their reporting in the Enquirer-Sun on state officials with ties to the Ku Klux Klan.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
ful0939-85.
Natasha Trethewey, a graduate of the University of Georgia and professor at Emory University, won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third collection of poems, Native Guard (2006).
Journalist Ralph McGill won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1959. As editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, McGill broke the code of silence on the subject of segregation.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Mike Luckovich, a native of Seattle, Washington, became the editorial cartoonist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1989. Luckovich has twice won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1995 and 2006, for his nationally syndicated work.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The main library at the University of Georgia is located on the historic north campus. UGA's library system contains more than 3.9 million volumes, making it the largest academic library in Georgia. The library is also home to the University of Georgia Press.
Photograph from Zlatko Unger
The University of Georgia Press, founded in 1938, produced its first catalog of books in 1940. At that time the press had published eight books, including its first title, Segments of Southern Thought, by Edd Winfield Parks, and its first volume of poetry, Marguerite, the Sister and Wife of Kings, by Rae S. Neely.
Courtesy of University of Georgia Press
Shoppers browse books at the Leed's Books display at the Decatur Book Festival in 2011.
Image from TimothyJ
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.
Natasha Trethewey was named poet laureate of the United States in 2012. A native of Mississippi, Trethewey graduated from the University of Georgia in 1989. Her third volume of poetry, Native Guard, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.
Courtesy of Emory University
Poet Natasha Trethewey signs books following a reading at the University of Georgia on January 16, 2008. Trethewey read selections from Native Guard, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2007.
Photograph by Sarah E. McKee, New Georgia Encyclopedia
Domestic Work (2000), by Natasha Trethewey, was selected by former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove to be the first winner of the Cave Canem Prize, awarded each year to the best first collection of poems by an African American poet.
Eliza Frances Andrews (pictured ca. 1879) was a writer of journals, novels, newspaper reports, botany articles and textbooks, and editorials. Her published diary, War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865, is one of the most compelling first-person accounts of the Civil War home front.
Courtesy of University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Lupton Library Special Collections
Image of Eliza Frances Andrews in the War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865, one of the most compelling first-person accounts of the Civil War (1861-65) home front, published in 1908. Eliza Frances Andrews was a writer, newspaper reporter, editor, columnist, social critic, scientist, and educator. By the time of her death in 1931 in Rome, Georgia, Andrews had written three novels, more than a dozen scientific articles on botany, two internationally recognized botany textbooks, and dozens of articles, commentaries, and reports on topics ranging from politics to environmental issues.
Image from The War Time Journal of a Georgia Girl (1908)
The Georgia Writers Association, founded by volunteers in 1994, supports and encourages literary efforts in the state by educating writers about the publishing industry, promoting the works of writers to the public, and sponsoring events. The organization also publishes a bimonthly journal, Georgia Writers News/Mag.
Courtesy of Georgia Writers Association
Anthony Grooms is the author of a collection of poetry, Ice Poems (1988), a collection of stories, Trouble No More (1995), and two novels, Bombingham (2001) and The Vain Conversation (2018).
Photograph by J. D. Scott
Founded by poet and novelist David Bottoms and fiction writer Pam Durban, Five Points printed their first issue in the fall of 1996.
Poet Alfred Corn's collection Contradictions was published in 2002 by Copper Canyon Press. Corn, born in Bainbridge, has published several collections of poetry as well as essays, translations, and other writings.
Poet Turner Cassity, a Mississippi native, worked for nearly thirty years as a librarian at Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Library. Cassity's verse tends toward the New Formalist school and offers a broad interpretation of modern "southernness."
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.
Coleman Barks is renowned both for his translations of the thirteenth-century poet Rumi and for his own verse. Barks was an English professor at the University of Georgia for over thirty years and continued to live and write in Athens until his death.
Courtesy of University of Georgia Photographic Services
The author Lillian Smith, a longtime resident of Clayton, is best known for her novel Strange Fruit, published in 1944, and her nonfiction treatise Killers of the Dream, first published in 1949 and reissued in 1961. Both works are strong denunciations of racism and segregation in the South.
Walter Griffin, pictured in 2005, founded the Atlanta Poets Workshop in 1972 and conducted meetings until 1998. Griffin had more than 400 publications to his credit and was named the master poet-in-residence by the Georgia Council for the Arts and Humanities in 1978.
Courtesy of Walter Griffin
In 1976 Walter Griffin, an Atlanta poet, published Port Authority: Selected Poems, 1965-1976. Another of his published collections, Night Music (1974), won the International Small Press Book Award and the Georgia Poet of the Year Award.
Georgia poet Rosemary Daniell leads a Zona Rosa workshop at her home in Savannah. Daniell founded this creative-writing forum for women in 1981 and christened it Zona Rosa, which is Spanish for "pink zone," in 1983. Similar workshops also operate in Atlanta, Daniell's hometown, and in Charleston, South Carolina.
Courtesy of Southern Living
The Woman Who Spilled Words All Over Herself (1997) is a writing guidebook for women by Rosemary Daniell. Daniell, the founder of the Zona Rosa workshops in Savannah, Atlanta, and Charleston, South Carolina, presents the writing process as an opportunity for women's healing and empowerment.
John Donald Wade posed for this portrait by Kate F. Edwards in the early 1910s. Wade, a great-great-grandson of John Adam Treutlen, the state's first governor, was an important participant in the Vanderbilt Agrarian movement of the 1930s. Also a noted biographer, Wade published works on the lives of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and John Wesley.
Native Georgian John Donald Wade contributed to I'll Take My Stand (1930), the manifesto of the Agrarian literary movement, while teaching at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1934 Wade returned to the University of Georgia, where his academic career began, and twelve years later founded the Georgia Review, a renowned literary journal.
From Selected Essays and Other Writings, edited by D. Davidson
Alfred Uhry, a native of Atlanta, is the author of several successful plays, including Driving Miss Daisy (1987), The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997), and Parade (1998). Uhry has received a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award, and several Tony Awards over the course of his career.
Photograph by Carol Rosseg
The spring 2005 issue of the Georgia Review features the work of Savannah artist Nancy Terry Hooten. A photograph of her beaded figure, The One Who Came Before (1998), appears on the cover. A literary journal founded in 1947 at the University of Georgia, the Georgia Review features fiction, poetry, book reviews, and full-color visual art.
Stanley Lindberg served as editor of the Georgia Review from 1977 until his death in 2000. He is credited with transforming this regional literary magazine into an award-winning journal that regularly publishes the work of some of the nation's most renowned writers.
Courtesy of University of Georgia Photographic Services
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.
Poet Van K. Brock's most recent collection of poetry, Lightered: New and Selected Poems, was published in 2005 by Anhinga Press. Anhinga, founded by Brock in 1972, publishes poetry chapbooks and holds a national poetry competition each year.
Courtesy of Anhinga Press
Van K. Brock, a Thomas County native, began writing poetry during the 1950s while studying and working at Emory University in Atlanta. In addition to publishing several books of poetry, Brock served as poetry editor for the journal National Forum and as editor for International Quarterly.
Courtesy of Anhinga Press
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
Janisse Ray, a native of Baxley, is an environmental activist and award-winning author.
Photograph by Nancy Marshall
Margaret Edson, a kindergarten teacher in Atlanta, began writing her Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Wit, in 1991. The play focuses on Vivian Bearing, a literature professor who is struggling with cancer.
Photograph by Dave Smiley
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 country-boy perspective of Georgia-born humorist and best-selling author Lewis Grizzard shaped his reaction to all of his personal experiences even as he became a national and international celebrity. Grizzard published twenty-five books on a variety of subjects, from women and religion to golf and UGA football.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Melissa Fay Greene, a native of Macon, has written two award-winning books chronicling dramatic episodes in the civil rights movement in Georgia: Praying for Sheetrock (1991) and The Temple Bombing (1996).
Photograph from UGA Today
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.
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
Each year The Chattahoochee Review publishes a special-focus issue. Past themes include "The South," "Ireland," "The Animal," and "Skin."
Courtesy of The Chattahoochee Review
The Chattahoochee Review, founded in 1981 at Georgia Perimeter College (later Georgia State University's Perimeter College), publishes both established and emerging writers, with an emphasis on writers from Georgia.
Courtesy of The Chattahoochee Review
The theme "Ireland" was the special focus of The Chattahoochee Review 's fall/winter issue in 2012. The artistic mission of the journal, published by Georgia State University's Perimeter College, is "Exporting the South. Importing the World."
Courtesy of The Chattahoochee Review
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.
Sanjena Sathian won the Townsend Prize for Fiction in 2024 for her novel Gold Diggers. Every other year a board of judges awards the Townsend to an outstanding novel or short-story collection written and published during the previous two years while the author lived in Georgia.
From Penguin Random House
Every other year a board of judges awards the Townsend Prize for Fiction to an outstanding novel or short-story collection written and published during the previous two years while the author lived in Georgia. The award is named for Jim Townsend, the founding editor of Atlanta magazine.
Courtesy of Clayton Ramsey
The Georgia Center for the Book, based at the DeKalb Public Library in Decatur, is the state affiliate for the Center of the Book at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Courtesy of Georgia Center for the Book
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.
The cover of Wyatt Prunty’s collection, Couldn't Prove, Had to Promise (2015).
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 Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang, by J. L. Spivak
An educator, activist, preacher, and poet, Don West worked throughout his life for social justice and the preservation of mountain culture. In 1964 West and his wife helped to open the Appalachian South Folklife Center at Pipestem, West Virginia, where West worked until his death in 1992. This photograph was taken at Pipestem circa 1986.
Courtesy of Yvonne Snyder Farley
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.
The poet and fiction writer Adrienne Bond was a long-time Macon resident who influenced many Georgia writers, including Judith Ortiz Cofer and Anthony Grooms.
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
James Dickey ranks as one of the most important Georgia poets of the twentieth century. His poetry is intensely confessional, largely apolitical, and directly focused on the interactions of the individual with the natural as well as the technologically transformed modern world.
Courtesy of Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, James Dickey Papers.
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.
Flannery O'Connor attended college at what is now Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville. She subsequently entered the master's program in creative writing at the University of Iowa and joined the now world-famous Writers' Workshop under Paul Engle.
Courtesy of Ina Dillard Russell Library, Georgia College and State University
Sidney Lanier is most noted for his experimental musical renderings of Georgia's fields, rivers, and shores in such poems as "Corn" (1875), "The Song of the Chattahoochee" (1877), and "The Marshes of Glynn" (1879).
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Georgia Photo File.
Conrad Aiken's literary autobiography, Ushant (1952), contains brilliant portraits of the literary scene in Boston, London, and New York during the first half of the century as it recounts the poet's literary pilgrimage.
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Conrad Aiken Papers.
Lillian Smith's best-known work, Strange Fruit (1944), is a novel of illicit interracial love that gained its author national attention.
Erskine Caldwell settled outside of Georgia shortly before he was twenty-five, paying extended visits to his parents in Wrens for as long as they lived there. Though he lived much of his life outside the South, the region stayed on his mind and figured prominently in most of his writing.
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
Flannery O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood (1952), is filled with her Christian vision and black humor. A novel of spiritual quest, it presents the male "pilgrim," Hazel Motes, as inhabiting a sterile and ugly modern landscape derivative of O'Connor's early model The Waste Land, a poem by T. S. Eliot.
Courtesy of Ina Dillard Russell Library, Georgia College and State University
Pam 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 Back (2000). She has won numerous literary awards and honors.
A German edition of Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel, Gone With the Wind.
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 Muscogee (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.
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
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
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's sketch "The Fox Hunt" appears in his Georgia Scenes (1835).
From Georgia Scenes, by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet
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
Georgia Douglas Johnson was an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance. 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.
Courtesy of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
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
Puerto Rican-born Judith Ortiz Cofer was the Regents' and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. Her works detailing Puerto Rican communities and cultural conflicts made her a leading literary interpreter of the U.S.-Puerto Rican experience.
Courtesy of University of Georgia Photographic Services
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.
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."
Courtesy of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame
Although Edgar Bowers received the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry, as well as two Guggenheim Fellowships, he remained largely unknown among readers of contemporary poetry.
Convicts are shown circa 1909 working on one of the first graded roads in Rockdale County. The convict lease system was abolished in 1908, as one of many reforms enacted during the Progressive era, but soon chain gangs took the place of convict leasing.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
roc063.
Alice Randall, a Harvard literature graduate and Nashville, Tennessee, writer of songs and scripts, fought lawyers from the Margaret Mitchell estate in order to have her novel The WInd Done Gone (2001) published.
Photograph from Alice Randall
John Stone was a poet, essayist, cardiologist, and lecturer, as well as a professor of medicine, associate dean, and director of admissions at the Emory University School of Medicine. He was named Emory's best clinical professor three times and received awards from the Georgia Writers Association, the Council of Authors and Journalists, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.
Courtesy of Emory University
Johnson teaches creative writing at Kennesaw State University and lives in Atlanta's Virginia Highland area. Like the main character in his 2001 novel, Sticky Kisses, Johnson owns two dachshunds.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Tom Wolfe, born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, is a former newspaper reporter and the best-selling author of such works as The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), The Right Stuff (1979), and The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). His novel A Man in Full (1998) created a stir in the Atlanta area.
Image from medusahead
Novelist, journalist, essayist, and short story writer Tina McElroy Ansa uses her native Macon and its historic African American Pleasant Hill district as a model for the fictional town of Mulberry, the setting of her first four novels.
Photograph by Erin Randall McLeod, New Georgia Encyclopedia
A statue of Brer Rabbit, a major character in the Uncle Remus tales by Joel Chandler Harris, stands in front of the Putnam County Courthouse. Harris's work, particularly his animal tales, brought African American folklore into the public spotlight.
Image from Mdxi
Caroline Miller won the Pulitzer Prize and France's Prix Femina for her first novel, Lamb in His Bosom (1933).
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Frank Daniel Papers.
Marion Montgomery, a poet, novelist, and literary critic, taught at the University of Georgia for thirty-three years. Piety and a recovery of reason are constant themes in his writing.
Courtesy of Marion Montgomery
Poet, dramatist, and novelist Frank Manley received two Georgia Author of the Year awards (one for fiction and one for short stories/anthologies), a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and first prize at the 1985 Humana Festival of New American Plays.
Courtesy of Emory University
With her short stories, novels, and essays, Janice Daugharty 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.
Photograph by Herb Pilcher
Smith has won numerous honors and awards, including the Aga Khan Prize from the Paris Review for his novella Crystal River and both the National Poetry Series Award in 1987 and the Great Lakes New Poets Award in 1988 for Red Roads.
Courtesy of Charlie Smith
Anne Rivers Siddons was best known for books about Atlanta and its environs, including Peachtree Road (1989) and Nora, Nora (2000).
Roy Blount Jr. is a humorist, journalist, sportswriter, poet, novelist, performer, editor, lyricist, lecturer, screenwriter, dramatist, and philologist. He recognizes and appreciates the comedic possibilities of the southern, and national, landscape.
Photograph from Roy Blount Jr.
In 1850 William Tappan Thompson became the founding editor of the Savannah Daily Morning News. With the exception of a short period during the Civil War, he was the editor of the newspaper until his death.
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Georgia Photo File.
Green's masterpiece is undoubtedly Moira (1950; published in English under the same title), an autobiographical novel set at the University of Virginia and dominated by the conflict between flesh and spirit, sin and grace.
Courtesy of The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University Archives, University of Virginia Library
Writer and editor Stephen Corey began working at the Georgia Review in 1983. He was editor-in-chief of the literary journal from 2008 until his retirement in 2019.
Poet Sidney Lanier was born in this house in Macon in 1842. Today, it is maintained by the Historic Macon Foundation as a museum.
Image from denisbin
A marsh in Glynn County is pictured from Jekyll Island in 2004. Poet Sidney Lanier was inspired to write "The Marshes of Glynn" (1879) after a visit to Brunswick. The poem's narrator begins with a rhythmic description of the thick marsh before his vision expands seaward, culminating in an epiphany that the vast marshes and sea are filled with power and mystery.
Photograph by Moultrie Creek
Born in Macon, Sidney Lanier was an accomplished poet, novelist, composer, and critic. This 1972 postage stamp commemorates his work.
Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum
Georgia native and award-winning writer Terry Kay was the author of numerous works of fiction, as well as two children's books and a collection of nonfiction prose. Kay's breakthrough novel, To Dance with the White Dog (1990), made him internationally famous.
Courtesy of Terry Kay
Terry Kay's tenth novel, The Book of Marie, was published in 2007 by Mercer University Press in Macon and recognized by the Georgia Writers Association as best fiction book of the year.
A prolific writer and Georgia native, Philip Lee Williams received the Georgia Writer of the Year Award from the Georgia Writers Association for In the Morning, Campfire Boys, and The Flower Seeker.
Georgia native Philip Lee Williams, pictured in 2006, is an award-winning novelist, essayist, and poet. A former journalist, Williams also worked for nearly twenty-five years at the University of Georgia, including thirteen years as director of public information for the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
Photograph by Brandon Williams
One of the South's most treasured authors, Joel Chandler Harris gained national prominence for his numerous volumes of Uncle Remus folktales.
Joel Chandler Harris died on July 3, 1908, of acute nephritis and was buried in Westview Cemetery in Atlanta. Obituary writers were not exaggerating when they eulogized this celebrated middle Georgia writer as "the most beloved man in America."
Joel Chandler Harris took his work as a fiction writer seriously, and he honed his craft considerably in the course of publishing seven volumes of short stories (in addition to the Uncle Remus tales) and three more novels.
This 1948 first-class postage stamp commemorates Georgia author Joel Chandler Harris. Harris's retelling of the story of Brer Rabbit remains one of the world's best-known folktales.
Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum
Once the home of Joel Chandler Harris, author of the Uncle Remus tales, the Wren's Nest is today the oldest house museum in Atlanta. Harris moved to this house in 1881, purchased it in 1883, and did most of his later writing here until his death in 1908. The house, on Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962.
From Bruce Bickley
Vereen Bell wrote fiction and magazine articles set in the southern outdoors, and he achieved popular success with Swamp Water (1940).
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Frank Daniel Papers.
Along with writing, painting was a lifelong passion for Fleming.
Reprinted by permission of Morris Communications
White's stories and essays, including Sleeping at the Starlite Hotel (1995) and Quite a Year for Plums (1998), evoke a vivid picture of life in south Georgia.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Hand-colored lithograph of Major Ridge, a Cherokee leader who helped establish the Cherokee system of government. The soldier, politician, and plantation owner is remembered for signing the Treaty of New Echota (1835), which ceded Cherokee lands to the U.S. government and authorized Cherokee removal.
From History of the Indian Tribes of North America, by T. McKenney and J. Hall
A deep but troubled friendship between Chivers and Edgar Allan Poe was founded on a mutual fascination with metaphysical speculations, as well as on shared literary interests.
Courtesy of the DeKalb Historical Society Archives, DeKalb Historical Society
Judson Mitcham was Georgia's poet laureate from 2012 to 2019. His poetry collection Somewhere in Ecclesiastes (1991) earned him both the Devins Award and recognition as Georgia Author of the Year. He has also written two award-winning novels, The Sweet Everlasting (1996) and Sabbath Creek (2004).
Courtesy of Judson Mitcham
Rubin's poetry appeared in several collections of contemporary southern poets; his poems characteristically focused on ahistorical images and the interior self rather than on any particular time or place.
Courtesy of Georgia Institute of Technology, Office of Communications and Public Affairs
Byer reclaims in her poetry and essays the traditions, customs, and voices of past Appalachian women, defining herself as an artist and, at the same time, addressing the concerns of women in today's South.
Image from -ted
New York native Berendt lived off and on in Savannah for eight years, interviewing locals and gathering material for Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Photograph by Marion Ettlinger
Critics generally were unimpressed with the film adaptation of John Berendt's book or with The Lady Chablis, who played herself in the movie.
Courtesy of The Lady Chablis
Published by Random House in January 1994, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil quickly became known in Savannah as simply "The Book." Since that time the nonfiction narrative 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.
Newman's novels, The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926) and Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers (1928), 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.
Courtesy of Atlanta History Center.
Atlanta-born Conroy drew on personal experiences for his highly popular books, including The Water Is Wide, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, and Beach Music.
A "military brat," writer Pat Conroy moved with his family numerous times during his childhood and youth.
Courtesy of Special Collections & Archives, Georgia State University Library, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Photographic Archive.
Born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925, Flannery O'Connor began her education at the city's parochial schools.
Courtesy of Ina Dillard Russell Library, Georgia College and State University
At the age of twenty-five, Flannery O'Connor contracted lupus and returned to her family's farm in Milledgeville, where she lived and wrote for the remainder of her life. She stayed in touch with the literary world through letters and became well known for raising a flock of peacocks.
Courtesy of Ina Dillard Russell Library, Georgia College and State University
Deeply influenced by his father, a minister and social reformer, Caldwell depicted life among the lowly in Georgia and the rest of the South in such works as Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933).
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Frank Daniel Papers.
James Kilgo was on the faculty of the University of Georgia from 1967 to 1999, where he received five Outstanding Honors Professor awards and the Honoratus Award for Excellence in Teaching. His novel, Daughter of My People (1998), earned him the Townsend Prize for Fiction.
Courtesy of University of Georgia Photographic Services
Lumpkin is best known for her autobiographical novel, The Making of a Southerner (1947), which describes her transition from passive inheritance of white supremacy to conscious rejection of the racial values of a segregated South.
From The Making of a Southerner, by K. D. Lumpkin
Cherokee County native David Bottoms was appointed by Governor Roy Barnes as Georgia's poet laureate in 2000. He remained in that post until 2012.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
David Bottoms served as state poet laureate of Georgia from 2000 to 2012. His first full-length volume of poetry, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump (1980), brought him national attention. The poems are set in a landscape of southern woods and honky-tonks, "good old boys" and semi-outlaws.
Photograph from David Bottoms
As poet laureate of Georgia, David Bottoms delivered a lecture entitled "Articulating the Spirit: Poetry, Community, and the Metaphysical Shortwave" at the 2002 awards luncheon for the Governor's Awards in the Humanities.
Courtesy of Georgia Humanities.
Harris's best-known work, A Circuit Rider's Wife (1910), is a semiautobiographical novel based on life with her Methodist minister husband, Lundy.
As a widow, Harris spent the last two decades of her life at her place "In the Valley" outside of Cartersville, Georgia. She died there in 1935.
Lundy Harris, a circuit-riding Methodist minister, married author Corra Harris when she was just seventeen years old. Their life together inspired Mrs. Harris's book A Circuit Rider's Wife. After twenty-four years of marriage, Mr. Harris died while visiting a friend near Pine Log.
Lillian Smith, pictured in the 1940s, stands in her vegetable garden at Laurel Falls Girls Camp in Rabun County, for which she served as director for nearly twenty-five years. In 1944 Smith published Strange Fruit, a novel controversial at the time for its depiction of an interracial relationship.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
rab356.
The author of such memorable Civil War poetry as "Little Giffen" (1867), Francis Orray Ticknor is buried in Columbus, where he lived with his wife and eight children at Torch Hill.
Image from Maurice Garland Fulton
Poet Laureate Bettie Sellers delivers a lecture entitled "Westward from Bald Mountain: Valleys for Writers" at the 1998 awards luncheon for the Governor's Awards in the Humanities. Sellers won a Governor's Award in 1987 and served as the state's poet laureate from 1997 to 2000.
Courtesy of Georgia Humanities.
Inman was a reclusive and unsuccessful poet whose 17-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.
From From a Darkened Room, by D. Aaron
In 1923 Arthur Crew Inman married Evelyn Yates, who remained with him for the rest of his life. She occupies a prominent if not always hallowed place in the diary: "She is homely as a stump fence built in the dark," he wrote of her, "but she doesn't giggle all the time."
From From a Darkened Room, by D. Aaron
Lillian Smith, pictured in 1945, refused to join the Southern Regional Council because she believed the organization should make the ending of segregation its top priority. She and Howard W. Odum held opposing views about the approach the council should take to achieve necessary reforms.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
rab360.
Lillian Smith is pictured in 1928 at Laurel Falls Girls Camp, which was founded by her family in Rabun County. Smith was director of the camp from around 1925 until 1949. During those years she wrote her two best-known works, Strange Fruit (1944) and Killers of the Dream (1949).
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, # rab288.
From her home in Clayton atop Old Screamer Mountain, Lillian Smith toured the South, talking to people from all races and classes.
Lillian Smith, a prominent writer and opponent of segegation during the Jim Crow era, is pictured in the 1940s with workmen at Laurel Falls Girls Camp in Rabun County. Smith served as director of the camp from around 1925 until 1949.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
rab355.
In 1868 Augusta Jane Evans married Colonel Lorenzo Madison Wilson, a wealthy planter twenty-eight years her senior who had been widowed in 1862. She moved to his estate, Ashland, next door to the Evans home and spent much of the rest of her life making it and its surrounding gardens one of Mobile, Alabama's most beautiful showplaces.
From Prominent Women of Georgia, edited by J. B. Nevin
Dickey joined the Army Air Corps in 1942. Although he spent thirteen months training to be a bomber pilot, he failed flight school and became a navigator instead. He joined the 418th Night Fighter Squadron in the Philippines in 1945, subsequently flying missions in Okinawa and Japan.
Courtesy of Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, James Dickey Papers.
James Dickey married his first wife, Maxine, in 1948; they had two sons. Maxine Dickey died after a long illness in late October 1976.
Courtesy of Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, James Dickey Papers.
James Dickey was an avid hunter during his lifetime and often wrote of his love for the sport in such poems as "Springer Mountain." Although much of his writing is set in the South, Dickey's work covers a wide range of themes, many of which are not specifically southern.
Courtesy of Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, James Dickey Papers.
Dickey's best work came in the first fifteen years of his career, and most of it is presented in his collection Poems: 1957-1967 (1967). His novel Deliverance (1970) brought him popular success and was a turning point for him both personally and artistically.
Courtesy of Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, James Dickey Papers.
James Dickey enjoyed an extensive personal library in his home.
Courtesy of Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, James Dickey Papers.
Afflicted with liver disease and fibrosis of the lungs, James Dickey died in January 1997, three days after teaching his last class at the University of South Carolina. He left behind an unfinished novel.
Courtesy of Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, James Dickey Papers.
