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Thomas Wolfe was born in 1900 in Ashville, North Carolina.  His parents split when he was a child and he lived with his mother in a boarding house.  Wolfe’s loneliness was his greatest resource for writing, He rarely saw her as she worked to provide for her children.

He was an avid reader and an excellent student. He attended the University of North Carolina where he wrote plays and performed them.  He graduated in 1920 and went on to earn a master’s degree at Harvard, but had no luck publishing his work. (more…)

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Daniel Woodrell was born, raised and remains in the Missouri Ozarks.  He dropped out of high school and joined the marines when he was seventeen. He later realized that the military was not for him so he returned to civilian life and went to the University of Kansas then on to the prestigious Iowa Writer’s School on a Michener Fellowship. He tried other things, and lived a lot of places, but ultimately decided he had to do what he loved –write. He lives in West Plains, Missouri.

His first novel, Under the Bright Lights drew critics’ praise. Since then he has published several novels including Muscle for the Wing, The Ones You Do, Woe to Live on, Give Us a Kiss: A Country Noir, The Death of Sweet Mister and Winter’s Bones (SLR’s review).

Woodrell coined the phrase “country noir” in an effort to describe the area in which he works.

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Robert Penn Warren was in Guthrie, Kentucky in 1905 and remained a resident of the South until his late thirties.  It would be the South, however, that would always rise to the surface of his writing, and the spirit of the South that would evoke the passionate and poetic language that became synonymous with his name.

In 1920 the course of his life changed—Warren lost sight in one eye when his young brother, Thomas, accidentally hit him with a stone.  Prior to the accident, he was awaiting an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy.  Forced to forego his aspirations for the Naval Academy, Warren enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee to study engineering.

While attending Vanderbilt, Warren’s roommate, Allen Tate, introduced him to a group of young writers, men brought together by their interest in writing poetry and a nostalgia for the culture of the South.  Also included in this group (more…)

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Born in 1931 in Richmond Virginia, Tom Wolfe had dreams of playing baseball professionally.  While he came closer than most with the same aspiration, he had to settle for writing.  He earned an education at Washington and Lee, and attended graduate school at Yale University.  His doctoral thesis studied Communist Organizational Activity among American Writers, 1929-1942.

Wolfe took his first newspaper job in 1956 and soon worked for the Washington Post, and the New York Herald Tribune.  While there he experimented with fictional techniques in feature stories.  He is credited with being the inventor of (more…)

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Born, Thomas Lanier Williams, in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911, Tennessee Williams was the first of two children born into a prestigious Tennessee family.  The family lived for seven years in Clarksdale, Mississippi, before moving to St. Louis in 1918. He went to college at the University of Missouri, but he did not stay long.  He returned to St. Louis and worked for a shoe company, and struggled to find a way to make a living writing.  His literary career did not show promise until six years later when he produced his first play, Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay, in Memphis.

Building upon the experience he gained with his first production, Williams had two of his plays, Candles to the Sun and The Fugitive Kind, produced by Mummers of St. Louis in 1937. He briefly attended Washington University before transferring to the University of Iowa where he graduated in 1938. (more…)

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Alice Walker was born the youngest of eight children in Eatonton, Georgia in 1944.  She went to college on a scholarship and rushed off to New York soon after graduation.  Her stay in New York was brief.  She moved to Tougaloo, Mississippi in the mid-1960’s and gave birth to her daughter. During this time, Walker became active in the Civil Rights Movement during and remains active today.

In 1982 she published The Color Purple, which earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1983.  Soon after, she started her own (more…)

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William Styron was born in June of 1925 in Newport News, Virginia. His father suffered from depression and his mother died when he was thirteen.  Following his mother’s death, Styron was sent to a boys’ preparatory.  He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Duke University (NC), then enlisted in the Marine Corps, where he served during World War II.

After leaving the service, he moved to New York worked McGraw-Hill Publishing and took classes with Hiram Haydn at the New School for Social Research. With guidance and encouragement from Haydn, Styron published his debut novel,  Lie Down in Darkness in 1951 at the age of twenty-six.  This novel launched his career and (more…)

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Vance Randolph was born February, 1892 in Pittsburg, Kansas, and he moved to southern Missouri in 1919. He spent the rest of his life in the Ozark Mountain region and became one of America’s most important folklorists and folk collectors.

He worked for over forty years with great intensity gathering lore of the Ozarks.  Because he lived in the Ozarks for most of his life, successively in Pineville, Missouri, Galena Missouri, Eureka Springs Arkansas, and Fayetteville Arkansas, he came to personally know the people and was therefore able to obtain and learn much more from them than could an outside folklore collector who only passed through the region briefly. (more…)