Famous Alabamians: Literary Figures

Famous Alabamians: Literary Figures

Beverly Barton

At the age of nine Beverly Beaver found her avocation. She wrote short stories, poetry, plays and novels all through her school years. After taking time off to marry, have children and become a homemaker, Beverly returned to her early love — writing. Having been a long-time fan of romance and living life with her own true love, romance writing seemed a natural.

Some of her most accomplished romance novels include the following:

• 
  On Her Guard (2002)
  
• 
  What She Doesn't Know (2002)
  
• 
  Grace Under Fire (2003)
  
• 
  The Last to Die (2004)
  

Rick Bragg

Born in Piedmont on July 26, 1959, Rick Bragg suffered a childhood of poverty and struggle. His difficult, alcoholic father and strong-willed mother would later become the main characters in his book All Over But the Shoutin'. Bragg attended Jacksonville State University from 1978-80, and began his journalism career as a sportswriter for the Jacksonville News. He went to work for The Anniston Star from 1980-85, then became a reporter for The Birmingham News (1985-89). After four years as the Miami Bureau Chief for the St. Petersburg (FL) Times, Bragg moved to L.A. as a metro reporter and magazine writer for the Los Angeles Times.

In January 1994, Bragg received an offer from The New York Times. He joined the Times as a metro reporter, but by October he won the position of domestic correspondent in the Atlanta office of the Times. Bragg's storytelling earned him an American Society of Newspaper Editor's Distinguished Writing Award, over thirty other national and state awards, and finally, in 1996, the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism. Bragg's stories have appeared in Best of the Press (1988) and Best Newspaper Writing (1991).

Bragg's memoir, All Over But the Shoutin', has received enormous acclaim since its release in 1996. Labeled "a classic piece of Americana," Shoutin' recounts Bragg's youth in Alabama. While a particularly Southern piece, Shoutin' transcends time and place as it chronicles the weaknesses and strengths of an American family.

Truman Capote

Capote is among the most famous of Southern writers, known not only as a Southern Gothic novelist, but also as a journalist and flamboyant public figure. He was born in New Orleans on September 24, 1924 and given the name Truman Streckfus Persons. His first stay in Alabama came after his parent's divorced and he was sent to live with relatives in Monroeville, Alabama. When his mother remarried, Truman changed his surname to Capote. His experiences with the people and places of Alabama are reflected in many of his books.

Capote's most accomplished pieces include the following:

• 
  Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948)
  
• 
  Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958)
  
• 
  In Cold Blood (1966)
  
• 
  Music for Chameleons (1981)
  

Mark Childress

Born in 1957 in the hometown of the soon-to-be-famous Harper Lee, Mark Childress was raised in both the South and the Midwest. Having graduated from the University of Alabama in 1978, he launched his career as a journalist by reporting for The Birmingham News. He later moved on to be the Features Editor of Southern Living magazine and Regional Editor of The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, while his articles and reviews appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Times of London, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Travel and Leisure.

Childress' contributions to the literary world include both children's books and novels aimed at adults. His four novels have been the ones to bring him success and notoriety:

• 
  V For Victor (1988)
  
• 
  Tender (1990)
  
• 
  Crazy in Alabama (1993)
  
• 
  Gone for Good (1998)
  

Childress has received recognition in his home state of Alabama. He has won the Thomas Wolfe Award of the University of Alabama, the University of Alabama's Distinguished Alumni Award, and the Alabama Library Association's Writer of the Year for 1994.

Dennis Covington

Dennis Covington, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, has authored works of both young adult fiction and journalistic exposition.

Covington's most accomplished novels include the following:

• 
  Lizard (1991)
  
• 
  Lasso the Moon (1995)
  
• 
  Salvation on Sand Mountain (1995)
  
• 
  Redneck Riviera (2003)
  

Zelda Sayre was born and raised in Montgomery, daughter of Alabama State Supreme Court Justice Anthony Dickinson Sayre. Known as a rebel and "show-off", her enigmatic personality was at odds with the genteel nature of her time. She became known for her party antics at the University of Alabama and her "philosophy of flapperdom". Her wild behavior, her social activities, her writing, and her marriage, to the writer F.Scott Fitzgerald, made her a major figure of the Jazz Age.

Between 1920 and 1932 Zelda published numerous essays and short stories, including the following:

• 
  Southern Girl (1929)
  
• 
  Miss Ella (1931)
  
• 
  Save Me The Waltz (1932)
  

Zelda's mental health began to deteriorate about 1927 and she was in and out of institutions until her death. Her last years were spent between her mother's home in Montgomery and the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. She died in a fire at that institution in 1948. She remains popular in her home town of Montgomery, and her memory lives on at the Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald Museum.

Fannie Flagg

Fannie Flagg was born in September of 1941 as Patricia Neal. She would later change her name to Fannie Flagg as she pursued acting and writing careers. By age 19, she already had her own 90-minute television show for ABC.

Fanny became a celebrated television and theatre scribe over the next decade. She continued to perform, appearing in television shows, recording comedy albums and winning small roles in films such as Five Easy Pieces, Patio Porch, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, and the starring role in the Tony award-winning musical, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. She also starred in the 1999 film Crazy in Alabama

In her thirties, Flagg decided to try her hand at yet another profession: novelist. Her most accomplished novels include the following:

• 
  Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1987)
  
• 
  Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man (1992)
  
• 
  Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (1998)
  
• 
  Standing in the Rainbow (2002)
  

Shirley Ann Grau

Born in 1930 in New Orleans, Shirley Grau spent many of her formative years in her mother's rural Alabama. Restless and determined from an early age, Grau set her sights on pursuing a career as a writer. Grau attended the Sophie Newcomb College — Tulane's women's division, and began publishing her fiction after her graduation in 1950.

The South is the backdrop and foreground for Grau's powerful works. She first published a series of short stories , The Black Prince and Other Stories (1955), then began her novel writing including the following novels:

• 
  The Hard Blue Sky (1958)
  
• 
  The House on Coliseum Street (1961)
  
• 
  The Keepers of the House(1964)
  
• 
  The Condor Passes (1973)
  
• 
  Roadwalkers (2003)
  

Winston Groom

Winston Groom grew up in Mobile, Alabama. After editing both the literary and humor magazines while a student at the University of Alabama, Groom found himself in Vietnam. This wrenching experience would provide material for two of Groom's later works.

Some of Groom's most accomplished novels include:

• 
  Forrest Gump (1994)
  
• 
  Shrouds of Glory (1996)
  
• 
  Such a Pretty, Pretty Girl (1999)
  
• 
  A Storm in Flanders (2002)
  

Linda Howard

Linda Howard stills lives in the small town of Gadsden, where she was born and bred. A prolific writer, Howard attended a small community college where she was the only journalism major. She began to write romance novels because these were the books she enjoyed reading. She wrote for many years before publishing her first novel.

Some of her most popular novels include the following:

• 
  Open Season (2001)
  
• 
  Cry No More (2003)
  
• 
  Dying to Please (2003)
  

James Byron Huggins

Novelist, journalist, religious activist; these all describe James Byron Huggins. Born in 1959, a graduate of Morgan County High School, and Troy State University, Huggins began his career as a journalist with the Hartselle Enquirer. Now known for his science fiction novels, Huggins did not take a direct route to writing fame.

While his fiction is fantastic, Huggins real life is even more bizzare. Huggins became homeless, living in his car and the woods. He decided to devote his life and life-savings to the efforts of the Christian Underground in Eastern Europe, a group created to smuggle information in and out of Iron Curtain countries. He continued his precarious lifestyle when in 1987 he traveled to Romania, smuggling Christian materials to the locals while sending photos and information to the U.S.

When he returned to the U.S., Huggins also returned to journalism. He worked for several small newspapers and a Christian magazine in Alabama, married, and began a family.

After penning three best-selling Christian oriented action thrillers, Leviathan, The Reckoning and A Wolf Story, Huggins broke into the mainstream science fiction market with the novel Cain. He picked up $1 million from Paramount Pictures for the film rights, and Universal Studios spent $1.25 million for the rights to Huggins' next book, Hunter.



William Bradford Huie
(1910-1986): Writer, Hartselle

Born in Hartselle in 1910, and educated at the University of Alabama, Huie became one of this century's most prominent and controversial writers when he simultaneously waded into the subject of civil rights in the South and created the practice of check-book journalism.

While settling into Hartselle, Huie wrote about the murder of a black teenager in Mississippi for Look magazine. In an effort to uncover the truth about the crime, he paid the two white men acquitted of the slaying for their story. Since they could not be tried again, they admitted to the killing. Despite the check-book journalism, Huie became known as a courageous investigator who helped hasten the Civil Rights movement.

In 1968, Huie again created outrage when he paid James Earl Ray $40,000 for his story of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Huie later concluded that Ray had indeed acted alone in committing the murder. This made him unpopular with his former supporters within the Civil Rights movement, as well as those outside the movement.

Some of his popular novels include:

• 
  Can Do! (1944)
  
• 
  From Omaha to Okinawa (1945)
  
• 
  Three Lives for Mississippi (1964)
  
• 
  He Slew the Dreamer (1970)
  

A renewed interest in World War II and the Civil Rights movement has led to a renewed interest in Huie works.

Born on April 28, 1926 in Monroeville, Nelle Harper Lee is Alabama's most famous author, despite the fact that she only published one novel in her lifetime. As the defining event of Harper Lee's early childhood, the Scottsboro Boys' trial formed the basis for the trial in To Kill A Mockingbird and also formed the race consciousness of young Nelle.

Lee attended Huntington College in Montgomery and then moved on to the University of Alabama, where she began to write for several student publications. She studied law, but left school in the mid-50's to move to New York and write. During this time, she began to collaborate with her childhood friend Truman Capote, and eventually would travel to the mid-west with him to research In Cold Blood.

Lee originally approached a literary agent with some short stories, but was convinced to lengthen one into a novel. To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 and has never been out of print since that date. In 1961 it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; Harper Lee was the first woman since 1942 to win the Pulitzer for Fiction. The novel became an Academy-award winning film, and was later adapted for the stage. The coupling of the story of a young girl's coming of age in rural Alabama and a tale of racial injustice created a powerful novel still popular among people of all ages. A Library of Congress Center for the Book study found that To Kill A Mockingbird was the second most influential book readers had ever experienced; the Bible took first place.

The popularity of To Kill A Mockingbird, along with the financial success of the film, allowed Harper Lee to retreat from the public eye and live a comfortable, quiet life.


Robert R. McCammon
Writer, Birmingham

Born in Birmingham, McCammon attended Banks High and then the University of Alabama. He discovered his love for writing when he had to read one of his stories in speech class at Banks. The students were mesmerized, and McCammon was hooked.

McCammon's most popular books include the following:

• 
  Swan Song (1987)
  
• 
  Boy's Life (1991)
  
• 
  Speaks the Nightbird (1997)
  

T.S. Stribling

T.S. Stribling, one of the better known Alabama writers of the first part of the century, was born in 1881 in Clifton, Tennessee. The greater part of his life was spent in North Alabama, studying at the Normal College of Florence (now the University of North Alabama), and the University of Alabama. He received a law degree in 1905, returned to Florence to practice at the bar, and remained that town's resident for the rest of his life.

After teaching school and traveling, Stribling turned to the literary life in 1921, working for newspapers and magazines, writing adventure stories, detective fiction, and several novels including the following:

• 
  Birthright (1922)
  
• 
  Teeftallow (1926)
  
• 
  Bright Metal (1928)
  
• 
  Backwater (1930)
  

Though his writing career slowed in the later years of his life, Stribling continued to produce novels and short stories. He taught novel writing at Columbia University in 1946 and 1950, but always returned to Florence, where he died in 1965.

Margaret Walker

Margaret Walker was born in Birmingham in 1915. Walker's grandmother had begun her life as a slave in Georgia, and her stories provided inspiration to young Margaret.

Langston Hughes read some of her poetry when Margaret was just sixteen; he encouraged her to go north for her education. Walker attended Northwestern University, graduated in 1935. In 1940, Walker received an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa. She published her thesis as For My People (1942) a collection of poetry. This collection brought her the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1942. Walker would later earn her Ph.D. from Iowa.

Walker's novel, Jubilee (1966), provides a view of the Civil War and emancipation from the standpoint of slaves. It is considered a groundbreaking work for its frank depictions of slave life. Walker went on to publish three more volumes of poetry:

• 
  Ballad of the Free
  
• 
  Prophets for a New Day
  
• 
  October Journey
  

Professor Emeritus of English at Jackson State, Walker published a "psychobiography" of her friend and fellow writer Richard Wright. Entitled Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, the biography has received wide-spread acclaim.

Walker died in December 1998.



Kathryn Tucker Windham
Author, Selma

Born in Selma on June 2, 1918, Kathryn Tucker Windham is best known for her Jeffrey series of ghost stories. She graduated from Huntingdon College in 1939, and was hired as a reporter for The Alabama Journal. She became one of the first female reporters to cover crime for a major daily newspaper in the South. She also worked for The Birmingham News and The Selma Times-Journal, winning several Associated Press awards for her writing and photography.

She published her first book, Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffery, in 1964. Other titles by Windham include:

• 
  Thirteen Georgia Ghosts and Jeffery (1973)
  
• 
  Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffery (1974)
  
• 
  Odd-Egg Editor (1990)
  
• 
  Ernest's Gift (2004)