Nonfiction
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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.
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 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.
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
Janisse Ray, a native of Baxley, is an environmental activist and award-winning author.
Photograph by Nancy Marshall
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
