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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 earned him the AmericanAcademy’s Prix de Rome.  In 1953 he married and together he and Rose had four children. (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…)

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John Crowe Ransom, born in Pulaski, Tennessee the son of a Methodist minister, was raised in a strongly religious though also very open-minded household.  He enrolled at Vanderbilt University when he was only fifteen. He graduated in 1909.  From 1910 – 1912 he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.

While at Oxford, Ransom’s letters to his father expressed an interest in philosophy more than in literature.  He was particularly interested in John Dewey and other American pragmatists.

When he returned he was appointed to an instructorship in Vanderbilt’s English department in 1914 and, (more…)

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Allen Tate was born in 1899 in Winchester, Kentucky.  His father’s business interests, mostly lumber, land and stock, forced the Tates to move often. This lifestyle took its toll on the family.  His parents’ marriage failed when he was only ten years old.  In 1916, he pursued the violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, he proved, however, unable to keep up with the other musicians.  He left and enrolled in college at Vanderbilt University.

He began attending meetings with other men from the English Department in 1922 and thus began the Fugitives– a group of men concerned with the  social climate of change they were witnessing in the South during that time. As editor of a poetry journal, Tate worked for three years promoting the literary renascence of the South. (more…)

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William Weaks Morris was born on November 29, 1934 in Jackson, Mississippi.  When he was six months old his parents moved to Yazoo City, Mississippi a small town located, as he writes in North Toward Home, “on the edge of the delta, straddling that memorable divide where the hills end and the flat land begins.”

Morris graduated top of his high school class in 1952 and left Mississippi for the University of Texas in Austin. It was in college that his civic mindedness and writing and editing skills came together. His senior year he became editor of the student newspaper and made a campus name for himself by tackling segregation, and censorship. Upon graduating in 1956, he continued his education as a Rhodes Scholar and studied history at Oxford University.

When he returned to the states in 1961 he took a position as editor of the Texas Observer, a weekly newspaper. In 1963, shortly before the publication of North Toward Home he became the youngest editor-in-chief in the history of Harper’s and he transformed the patriarchal magazine into one of the country’s most hip and influential journals. (more…)

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Born in 1897 to a wealthy white family in Jasper Florida (a town near the Georgia border) Lillian Smith was first and foremost a civil rights activist.  As a gifted writer, she devoted her life to the racial justice and equality for women.

Smith began her literary career writing for a journal called Pseudopodia (1936), The North Georgia Review (1937 – 1941) and South Today (1942 – 1945).

In 1944 she became well-known, even notorious for her controversial novel, Strange Fruit, which chronicles the tragic love story between a white man and a black woman.  The story is told through blatant language, sexual undertones and controversial depictions of small southern towns. The novel was banned in Boston for obscenity. Proving that controversy is the best marketing strategy for success, Strange Fruit sold over three million copies and was translated into fourteen languages. (more…)

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“In the South,” Smith says, “sense of place implies who you are and what your family did. It’s not just literally the physical surroundings, what stuff looks like. It’s a whole sense of the past. Even if I write a short story, I have to make diagrams of what the character’s house looks like and where the house is in relation to the town.”

(In fact, Putnam recently returned to her a map she drew when she wrote Oral History, depicting not only the physical setting for the novel, but also the geographical relationship of all the characters.) (more…)

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Ernest J. Gaines was born in 1933 on the False River Plantation in Pointe Coupée Parish, Louisiana, a hamlet in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, which is the setting of the majority of his fictional work. Gaines was the fifth generation in his family to be born there.

At the age of nine, he was picking cotton in the plantation fields allowing the black quarter’s school to hold classes for only five months a year. At the age of fifteen, he moved to California to join his parents, who had left Louisiana during World War II. (more…)