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.
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
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'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.
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
A German edition of Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel, Gone With the Wind.
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
