http://encyclopediavirginia.org http://encyclopediavirginia.org/img/EV_Logo_sm.gif This is the url http://encyclopediavirginia.org The first and ultimate online reference work about the Commonwealth /Andrews_V_C_1923-1986 Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:19:14 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Andrews_V_C_1923-1986 Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:19:14 EST]]> /Cooke_Philip_Pendleton_1816-1850 Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:47:03 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cooke_Philip_Pendleton_1816-1850 Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:47:03 EST]]> /Cooke_John_Esten_1830-1886 Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:31:10 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cooke_John_Esten_1830-1886 Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:31:10 EST]]> /Cooke_Giles_Buckner_1838-1937 Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:30:34 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cooke_Giles_Buckner_1838-1937 Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:30:34 EST]]> /Chalmers_Anna_Maria_Mead_1809-1891 Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:32:38 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Chalmers_Anna_Maria_Mead_1809-1891 Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:32:38 EST]]> /Cabell_James_Branch_1879-1958 Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:16:35 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cabell_James_Branch_1879-1958 Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:16:35 EST]]> /Butt_Martha_Haines_1833-1871 Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:46:02 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Butt_Martha_Haines_1833-1871 Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:46:02 EST]]> /Brock_Sarah_Ann_1831-1911 Wed, 17 Apr 2013 11:03:47 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Brock_Sarah_Ann_1831-1911 Wed, 17 Apr 2013 11:03:47 EST]]> /Berkeley_Sir_William_1605-1677 Wed, 17 Apr 2013 09:09:40 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Berkeley_Sir_William_1605-1677 Wed, 17 Apr 2013 09:09:40 EST]]> /Chapter_2_Mr_Jefferson_an_excerpt_from_Lewis_Rand_by_Mary_Johnston_1908 Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:11:52 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Chapter_2_Mr_Jefferson_an_excerpt_from_Lewis_Rand_by_Mary_Johnston_1908 Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:11:52 EST]]> /Review_of_Lewis_Rand_October_18_1908 Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:07:08 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Review_of_Lewis_Rand_October_18_1908 Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:07:08 EST]]> /_Mary_Johnston_s_New_Novel_by_E_F_S_October_3_1908 Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:00:06 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/_Mary_Johnston_s_New_Novel_by_E_F_S_October_3_1908 Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:00:06 EST]]> /Review_of_Lewis_Rand_an_excerpt_from_Latest_News_in_the_Book_World_October_12_1908 Fri, 01 Mar 2013 09:56:58 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Review_of_Lewis_Rand_an_excerpt_from_Latest_News_in_the_Book_World_October_12_1908 Fri, 01 Mar 2013 09:56:58 EST]]> /Review_of_Lewis_Rand_an_excerpt_from_A_Road_Map_of_the_New_Books_by_H_L_Mencken_January_1909 Fri, 01 Mar 2013 09:53:56 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Review_of_Lewis_Rand_an_excerpt_from_A_Road_Map_of_the_New_Books_by_H_L_Mencken_January_1909 Fri, 01 Mar 2013 09:53:56 EST]]> /_Powerful_Novel_by_Mary_Johnston_October_3_1908 Fri, 01 Mar 2013 09:48:55 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/_Powerful_Novel_by_Mary_Johnston_October_3_1908 Fri, 01 Mar 2013 09:48:55 EST]]> /Review_of_To_Have_and_to_Hold_April_1900 Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:46:45 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Review_of_To_Have_and_to_Hold_April_1900 Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:46:45 EST]]> /_Mary_Johnston_in_Her_Home_by_Annie_Kendrick_Walker_March_24_1900 Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:42:16 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/_Mary_Johnston_in_Her_Home_by_Annie_Kendrick_Walker_March_24_1900 Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:42:16 EST]]> /_Miss_Johnston_s_To_Have_and_to_Hold_February_10_1900 Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:39:35 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/_Miss_Johnston_s_To_Have_and_to_Hold_February_10_1900 Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:39:35 EST]]> /_A_Book_Very_Like_To_Have_and_to_Hold_by_L_F_A_Maulsby_June_9_1900 Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:36:49 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/_A_Book_Very_Like_To_Have_and_to_Hold_by_L_F_A_Maulsby_June_9_1900 Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:36:49 EST]]> /_Miss_Johnston_s_Virginia_by_Thomas_Dixon_Jr_November_1900 Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:33:12 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/_Miss_Johnston_s_Virginia_by_Thomas_Dixon_Jr_November_1900 Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:33:12 EST]]> /Review_of_Lewis_Rand_November_1_1908 Fri, 22 Feb 2013 10:08:44 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Review_of_Lewis_Rand_November_1_1908 Fri, 22 Feb 2013 10:08:44 EST]]> /Chapter_33_In_Which_My_Friend_Becomes_My_Foe_an_excerpt_from_To_Have_and_to_Hold_by_Mary_Johnston_1900 Wed, 13 Feb 2013 11:52:33 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Chapter_33_In_Which_My_Friend_Becomes_My_Foe_an_excerpt_from_To_Have_and_to_Hold_by_Mary_Johnston_1900 Wed, 13 Feb 2013 11:52:33 EST]]> /Known_World_The_2003 Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:10:28 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Known_World_The_2003 Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:10:28 EST]]> /_Will_you_kill_me_an_excerpt_from_Prisoners_of_Hope_by_Mary_Johnston_1898 Tue, 08 Jan 2013 10:12:36 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/_Will_you_kill_me_an_excerpt_from_Prisoners_of_Hope_by_Mary_Johnston_1898 Tue, 08 Jan 2013 10:12:36 EST]]> /_A_people_free_as_the_eagle_an_excerpt_from_Prisoners_of_Hope_by_Mary_Johnston_1898 Tue, 08 Jan 2013 09:39:23 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/_A_people_free_as_the_eagle_an_excerpt_from_Prisoners_of_Hope_by_Mary_Johnston_1898 Tue, 08 Jan 2013 09:39:23 EST]]> /_They_hunt_you_down_an_excerpt_from_Prisoners_of_Hope_by_Mary_Johnston_1898 Tue, 08 Jan 2013 09:06:56 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/_They_hunt_you_down_an_excerpt_from_Prisoners_of_Hope_by_Mary_Johnston_1898 Tue, 08 Jan 2013 09:06:56 EST]]> /_Turbulent_Virginia_1898 Mon, 07 Jan 2013 16:05:35 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/_Turbulent_Virginia_1898 Mon, 07 Jan 2013 16:05:35 EST]]> /_World_of_Books_1899 Mon, 07 Jan 2013 15:41:10 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/_World_of_Books_1899 Mon, 07 Jan 2013 15:41:10 EST]]> /_Preface_an_excerpt_from_Antifanaticism_A_Tale_of_the_South_by_Martha_Haines_Butt_1853 Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:17:09 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/_Preface_an_excerpt_from_Antifanaticism_A_Tale_of_the_South_by_Martha_Haines_Butt_1853 Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:17:09 EST]]> /Meade_Julian_R_1909-1940 Thu, 29 Nov 2012 16:22:19 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Meade_Julian_R_1909-1940 Julian R. Meade, a Danville native who came from a well-to-do family, is remembered as the author of books that memorably detail the lives and characteristics of Virginians of the 1920s and 1930s. His interests were broad: by the time he died at the age of thirty-one, he had already enjoyed an active career publishing in national magazines, chronicled Virginia in fiction and nonfiction, published several children's books, and dabbled in illustration. Meade was known as something of a humorist and led an active social life, corresponding with many other authors of his day.
Thu, 29 Nov 2012 16:22:19 EST]]> /Edmunds_Murrell_1898-1981 Thu, 29 Nov 2012 15:53:31 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Edmunds_Murrell_1898-1981 Thu, 29 Nov 2012 15:53:31 EST]]> /Blake_or_the_Huts_of_America_1859-1861 Fri, 28 Sep 2012 13:25:08 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Blake_or_the_Huts_of_America_1859-1861 Fri, 28 Sep 2012 13:25:08 EST]]> /Jenkins_Will_F_1896-1975 Fri, 28 Sep 2012 10:44:56 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Jenkins_Will_F_1896-1975 Fri, 28 Sep 2012 10:44:56 EST]]> /Holladay_Cary_C_1958- Fri, 27 Jul 2012 10:04:09 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Holladay_Cary_C_1958- Cary C. Holladay, a native of Virginia, is the author of two novels— A Fight in the Doctor's Office (2008) and Mercury (2002)—and three collections of short stories: The People Down South (1989), The Palace of Wasted Footsteps (1998), and The Quick-Change Artist: Stories (2006). She is the winner of numerous literary awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (2006), the Miami University Press Novella Contest (2008), the Goodheart Prize (2006), the Glimmer Train Fiction Open (2006), the Paul Bowles Prize for Fiction (2002), the O. Henry Award (1999), and the Southern Humanities Review Annual Best Story Award (1997). Her fiction has appeared in New Stories from the South, as well as The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, and Epoch, among others.
Fri, 27 Jul 2012 10:04:09 EST]]> /Bausch_Richard_1945- Wed, 25 Jul 2012 15:13:02 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Bausch_Richard_1945- Richard Bausch is a novelist and short-story writer whose career has spanned nearly thirty years. He has been called "one of our greatest short story writers" and earned equally high praise for his novels. Though he often has been described as a cartographer of the male experience, critics also have noted Bausch's skill at rendering the lives of women. His fiction, much of which is set in Virginia, is primarily character-driven and is known for creating complex emotional environments. Born at Fort Benning, Georgia, and raised near Washington, D.C., Bausch taught writing at George Mason University in Fairfax County for many years and in 2005 became a professor at the University of Memphis. His identical twin brother is the novelist Robert Bausch.
Wed, 25 Jul 2012 15:13:02 EST]]> /Bausch_Robert_1945- Wed, 25 Jul 2012 11:25:03 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Bausch_Robert_1945- Wed, 25 Jul 2012 11:25:03 EST]]> /Shenandoah Wed, 25 Jul 2012 10:54:05 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Shenandoah Shenandoah is a literary journal published three times a year by Washington and Lee University in Lexington. Founded in 1950 by J. J. Donovan, D. C. G. Kerry, and Tom Wolfe, the journal publishes fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews. Although originally conceived as a forum for undergraduate work, the magazine soon began to publish regional, national, and international writers, traditionally featuring unknown authors alongside such literary heavyweights as James Dickey, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, W. H. Auden, Flannery O'Connor, and William Faulkner. The journal has a subscriber list of approximately 1,800. In 2008, Shenandoah was awarded the Governor's Award for the Arts by Virginia governor Tim Kaine.
Wed, 25 Jul 2012 10:54:05 EST]]> /Hankla_Cathryn_1958- Wed, 11 Jul 2012 16:19:20 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Hankla_Cathryn_1958- Cathryn Hankla is a poet, novelist, essayist, short story writer, visual artist, and teacher, and is the author of numerous books, including the novel A Blue Moon in Poorwater (1988), which is set in the Appalachian highlands of Tennessee and southwestern Virginia. Hankla is a professor of English at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, where she has taught since 1982. She is poetry editor of the Hollins Critic.
Wed, 11 Jul 2012 16:19:20 EST]]> /Cheuse_Alan_1940- Wed, 11 Jul 2012 11:43:39 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cheuse_Alan_1940- Alan Cheuse is a novelist, book reviewer, memoirist, and professor of creative writing at George Mason University. He has written three novels, three collections of short fiction, a memoir, and a collection of essays. As a book reviewer, Cheuse has been a regular contributor to National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" since the 1980s. His criticism reflects the strengths of his fiction: a careful attention to voice and character that embodies both the influences of other notable writers and his own distinctive sense of whimsy.
Wed, 11 Jul 2012 11:43:39 EST]]> /Faulkner_William_1897-1962 Wed, 13 Jun 2012 13:41:25 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Faulkner_William_1897-1962 William Faulkner was a Mississippi-born novelist, poet, and screenwriter, winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in literature, and twice a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (1955, 1963). Considered one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century, he used primarily southern settings in his work—many of his most famous novels, including The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), were set in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi—and examined complex social, psychological, and racial issues. A modernist, he often composed his tragic, even Gothic stories in a dense, stream-of-consciousness style that attempted to emulate the ebb and flow of his characters' thoughts. His characters, meanwhile, ranged from the descendants of slaves to the richest of New South aristocrats, from the illiterate and mentally ill to the Harvard educated. During the last years of his life, Faulkner was a writer-in-residence and a professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Wed, 13 Jun 2012 13:41:25 EST]]> /Poe_Edgar_Allan_1809-1849 Wed, 13 Jun 2012 13:33:07 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Poe_Edgar_Allan_1809-1849 Edgar Allan Poe was a poet, short story writer, editor, and critic. Credited by many scholars as the inventor of the detective genre in fiction, he was a master at using elements of mystery, psychological terror, and the macabre in his writing. His most famous poem, "The Raven" (1845), combines his penchant for suspense with some of the most famous lines in American poetry. While editor of the Richmond-based Southern Literary Messenger, Poe carved out a philosophy of poetry that emphasized brevity and beauty for its own sake. Stories, he wrote, should be crafted to convey a single, unified impression, and for Poe, that impression was most often dread. "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843), for instance, memorably describes the paranoia of its narrator, who is guilty of murder. After leaving Richmond, Poe lived and worked in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New York, seeming to collect literary enemies wherever he went. Incensed by his especially sharp, often sarcastic style of criticism, they were not inclined to help Poe as his life unraveled because of sickness and poverty. After Poe's death at the age of forty, a former colleague, Rufus W. Griswold, wrote a scathing biography that contributed, in the years to come, to a literary caricature. Poe's poetry and prose, however, have endured.
Wed, 13 Jun 2012 13:33:07 EST]]> /Fathers_The_1938 Thu, 10 May 2012 14:21:19 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Fathers_The_1938 The Fathers (1938) is the only novel by Allen Tate, a Kentucky-born poet most famous for his "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1928). Set just before and during the American Civil War (1861–1865), the book details the tragic fall of two families joined by marriage—the Buchans, of Fairfax County and the Poseys, of Georgetown in the Distict of Columbia. Their violent and psychologically complex story, narrated by the elderly doctor Lacy Buchan, is intended to mirror the decline of "Old Virginia" and the rise of a new society unbound to traditional, agrarian codes. The Fathers was initially well received by critics, with the Washington Post calling it "a sensitive and successful re-creation of the divided moods of Virginia at the outbreak of the Civil War," and the New York Times labeling it "a quiet yet relentless exploration of the darker places of human character." The novel soon fell out of favor, however, with critics arguing that it was lifeless and overly symbolic and abstract. The novel's current critical neglect may reflect the social and political eclipse of Tate's Southern Agrarian ideology, which extolled the moral virtues of the antebellum South against encroaching modernity. Far from being a mere Lost Cause tract, however, The Fathers is widely considered to be an enduring, if flawed, piece of art.
Thu, 10 May 2012 14:21:19 EST]]> /_Among_the_New_Books_Good_Novel_of_Colonial_Virginia_by_Mary_Johnston_1898 Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:34:35 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/_Among_the_New_Books_Good_Novel_of_Colonial_Virginia_by_Mary_Johnston_1898 Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:34:35 EST]]> /_Mary_Johnston_Author_of_Prisoners_of_Hope_1899 Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:40:13 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/_Mary_Johnston_Author_of_Prisoners_of_Hope_1899 Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:40:13 EST]]> /Prisoners_of_Hope_1898 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:43:21 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Prisoners_of_Hope_1898 Prisoners of Hope (1898) is the first novel by the Virginia-born writer Mary Johnston. An action-adventure story and romance set in Gloucester County in 1663, the novel is based in part on the Gloucester County Conspiracy, a planned rebellion by indentured servants who intended to march to the home of Governor Sir William Berkeley and demand their freedom. The hero of Prisoners of Hope is Godfrey Landless, a convict laborer in Virginia who once fought for Oliver Cromwell. Landless takes charge in planning a servant rebellion, only to fall in love with his master's daughter, Patricia. When his plans are revealed, Landless is imprisoned, but eventually wins Patricia's love by saving her from a fictional band of Virginia Indians. Johnston portrays colonial Virginia much as Lost Cause writers and novelists painted the antebellum South: as an idyllic place where an enslaved African American might be viewed as "simply a good-humored, docile, happy-go-lucky, harmless animal." Critics from London to New York praised the novel when it was released, and Johnston went on to become a best-selling author; however, few scholars study her today.
Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:43:21 EST]]> /Slave_Ship_The_1924 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 10:58:17 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Slave_Ship_The_1924 The Slave Ship (1924) is the eighteenth novel by the Virginia-born writer Mary Johnston. Set in Scotland, Virginia, Africa, and Jamaica, the novel follows twelve years in the life of David Scott, who is captured at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 and then transported to Virginia as a convict laborer. After a daring escape, Scott finds refuge on the slave ship Janet. There he works his way up from clerk to captain, making numerous voyages to the Slave Coast of West Africa and participating in the infamous Middle Passage, during which millions of enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas. Johnston's novel reflects her own extensive research on the Atlantic slave trade and, at times, an impressive attention to detail. Nevertheless, Johnston consistently understates the horrors of the Middle Passage and especially of the captains and crews who violently oversaw their human cargoes. Reviews of The Slave Ship upon its release were generally positive. The New York Times, for instance, praised its evocative descriptions while worrying that Johnston's theme—that master and servant are both slaves—distracted from the brutal reality of African enslavement.
Fri, 20 Apr 2012 10:58:17 EST]]> /Dos_Passos_John_1896-1970 Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:14:32 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Dos_Passos_John_1896-1970 John Dos Passos was a novelist, poet, critic, and painter whose mother was born in Virginia. He came of age traveling through Europe and, after graduating from Harvard University in 1916, served as an ambulance driver during World War I (1914–1918). Amid the destruction of Victorian Europe, Dos Passos developed left-leaning politics that set him against war and in support of workers' rights. As a modernist writer, he became connected with the so-called Lost Generation of F. Scott Fitzgerald, his Harvard classmate E. E. Cummings, and his longtime friend Ernest Hemingway. Dos Passos is most recognized for his three novels known as the U.S.A. trilogy (1930–1936), which critique American culture from the left. In the 1940s, however, when Dos Passos moved to a farm on the Northern Neck in Westmoreland County, Virginia, his politics turned sharply to the right, ending his relationship with Hemingway and deeply affecting his legacy among critics. Dos Passos, who died in 1970, is buried in Westmoreland County and his papers are at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The John Dos Passos Prize for Literature has been awarded since 1980 by Longwood University in Farmville.
Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:14:32 EST]]> /Taylor_Peter_1917-1994 Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:08:06 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Taylor_Peter_1917-1994 Peter Taylor was a short-story writer and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Summons to Memphis (1986). During a writing career that spanned six decades, much of which was spent in Charlottesville, he established himself as a master of short fiction, displaying elegance and lucidity of style in examining family life in the New South. Many early stories were published in the New Yorker, and after joining the faculty at the University of Virginia in 1967, Taylor experienced a mid-life second flowering and produced the fiction for which he is best remembered. In 1978, he was awarded the Gold Medal for the Short Story by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Wider public notice followed, although it may still have been true, as he proclaimed himself, that he was "the best-known unknown writer in America."
Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:08:06 EST]]> /Caruthers_William_Alexander_1802-1846 Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:07:47 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Caruthers_William_Alexander_1802-1846 Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:07:47 EST]]> /Sapphira_and_the_Slave_Girl_1940 Mon, 06 Jun 2011 14:19:05 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Sapphira_and_the_Slave_Girl_1940 Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) is the last novel by Willa Cather and the Virginia-born writer's only book set entirely in the state. Based on an incident in Cather's own family, in which her maternal grandmother helped a slave escape in 1856, the novel details the complicated marriage of Henry and Sapphira Colbert, who operate a mill and small farm in Back Creek outside Winchester in the years before the American Civil War. Sapphira wrongly suspects that one of her slaves, Nancy, is in an intimate relationship with her husband, and manipulates those around her to exact revenge. Henry and the couple's daughter, Rachel, intervene by helping Nancy flee to Canada. At the time of its release, Sapphira and the Slave Girl was praised by the New York Times for examining "the question of slavery without any portentous fanfare," but in the years since, the book has not been widely read. Most critics have charged Sapphira with being racist and overly nostalgic, while a few have defended it as a brilliant inversion of old stereotypes and a coded exploration of sexual desire.
Mon, 06 Jun 2011 14:19:05 EST]]> /Tucker_George_1775-1861 Mon, 16 May 2011 13:01:57 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Tucker_George_1775-1861 Mon, 16 May 2011 13:01:57 EST]]> /Seawell_Molly_Elliot_1860-1916 Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:42:28 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Seawell_Molly_Elliot_1860-1916 Molly Elliot Seawell was the author of forty books, including regional fiction, romances, books for boys (primarily nautical stories), and nonfiction. She also penned political columns for newspapers in Washington, D.C., and New York. Socially conservative, she opposed the growing woman suffrage movement, and her consistent depictions of African Americans as servants and slaves—while acceptable to and endorsed by much of her white readership at that time—reflected her belief that blacks were inferior and peripheral members of society. Despite her social views, critics often described her books, many of which were reviewed in the New York Times, as "sweet" or "wholesome." Though her books boasted vividly drawn characters, they did not pursue the themes and styles of literary realism that characterized the more progressive literary trends of her time. Seawell, however, remained a single woman and worked as a prolific writer who supported her household by her various publications.
Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:42:28 EST]]> /The_Confessions_of_Nat_Turner_by_William_Styron_1967 Thu, 07 Apr 2011 11:00:55 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/The_Confessions_of_Nat_Turner_by_William_Styron_1967 The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel by William Styron, was published in 1967 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1968. The title character is based on the historical Nat Turner, a slave preacher and self-styled prophet who, in August 1831, led the only successful slave revolt in Virginia's history, which in just twelve hours left fifty-five white people in Southampton County dead. (A slave named Gabriel conspired to revolt in 1800, but his plans were discovered before he could carry them out.) The historical Nat Turner, in turn, is largely the product of "The Confessions of Nat Turner, as fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray," a pamphlet published shortly after Turner's trial and execution in November 1831. Although it played a crucial role in shaping perceptions of the event around the central figure of Turner, the pamphlet itself only reached a small portion of the reading public. The story awaited the Virginia-born Styron, who translated the historical record into a popular medium that commanded the full attention of the reading public and the national media. Despite its awards, however, that attention was not always positive. Published at the height of the Black Power movement and after a long summer of race riots in the United States, Styron's novel was labeled by some civil rights activists as racist, especially because of the author's depiction of Turner lusting after white women, one of whom he eventually kills.
Thu, 07 Apr 2011 11:00:55 EST]]> /Anderson_Sherwood_1876-1941 Thu, 07 Apr 2011 10:24:37 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Anderson_Sherwood_1876-1941 Sherwood Anderson was a poet, novelist, essayist, businessman, and newspaper editor most often associated with the American Midwest. His notable collection of related short stories, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), examined small-town life in the late 1800s. Anderson moved in the highest of American literary circles, entertaining—and to some extent even influencing—such writers as William Faulkner (about whom Anderson wrote the short story "A Meeting South") and Ernest Hemingway, who parodied Anderson in his debut novel The Torrents of Spring (1926). Anderson moved to southwestern Virginia in 1926, where he spent the rest of his years chronicling life in the depression-era South.
Thu, 07 Apr 2011 10:24:37 EST]]> /Adams_Alice_1926-1999 Thu, 07 Apr 2011 10:17:21 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Adams_Alice_1926-1999 Alice Adams was the author of eleven novels and six collections of short stories, and was the recipient of an O. Henry Award for short fiction twenty-three times. She was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and her life and literary career spanned more than a half century of extraordinary changes for women in American society. In her writing, Adams chronicled those changes in the lives of women following World War II (1939–1945), much as F. Scott Fitzgerald, to whom she has been compared both as a prose stylist and social historian, had chronicled the emergence of the new woman after World War I (1914–1918).
Thu, 07 Apr 2011 10:17:21 EST]]> /Harland_Marion_1830-1922 Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:55:42 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Harland_Marion_1830-1922 Marion Harland was a writer of novels, short stories, biographies, travel narratives, cookbooks, and domestic manuals whose career stretched across seven decades of sectional conflict and great change in American life. Harland chronicled much of that change, penning novels that suggested her own divided loyalties between North and South before establishing herself as an expert and often a sly and sarcastic commentator on the domestic arts of homemaking.
Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:55:42 EST]]> /Pickett_LaSalle_Corbell_1843-1931 Tue, 05 Apr 2011 10:44:50 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Pickett_LaSalle_Corbell_1843-1931 LaSalle Corbell Pickett was a prolific author and lecturer, and the third wife of George E. Pickett, the Confederate general best known for his participation in the doomed frontal assault known as Pickett's Charge during the American Civil War (1861–1865). After her husband's death in 1875, she traveled the country to promote a highly romanticized version of his life and military career that was generally at odds with the historical record. George Pickett emerged from the war with a strained relationship with Robert E. Lee—whom he partly blamed for the destruction of his division at Gettysburg (1863)—and accused of war crimes. But in his wife's history, Pickett and His Men (1899), this not-always-competent soldier was transformed into the ideal Lost Cause hero, "gallant and graceful as a knight of chivalry riding to a tournament." This image largely stuck in the American consciousness, leaving historians to spend much of the next century attempting to separate Pickett from his myth.
Tue, 05 Apr 2011 10:44:50 EST]]> /Magruder_Julia_1854-1907 Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:21:41 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Magruder_Julia_1854-1907 Julia Magruder was the author of sixteen novels, many short stories, and a number of essays on social issues. In her writings throughout her life, she often defended the South against outside criticism. Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, she lived most of her life in Washington, D.C., but traveled widely in Europe and had a vast circle of friends that included her cousin, Helen Magruder, who became Lady Abinger of Inverlochy Castle, Scotland; and the Virginia novelist Amélie Rives. Magruder's novels, mostly written for young female readers seeking marriage and romance, usually follow a heroine who must overcome slight obstacles to marry her true love.
Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:21:41 EST]]> /Pharr_Robert_Deane_1916-1992 Tue, 23 Nov 2010 12:17:37 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Pharr_Robert_Deane_1916-1992 Robert Deane Pharr was an acclaimed author of five novels, the first of which, The Book of Numbers (1969), was published while he was a fifty-three-year-old waiter in New York. Setting out to be "a black Sinclair Lewis," Pharr focused on the harsh yet vibrant living conditions faced by countless African Americans in urban America from the 1930s to the 1970s. Critics such as Susan Lardner of the New Yorker celebrated Pharr for his "tough, emotion-laden dialogue" and the profound sense of pain and loss that permeates his work.
Tue, 23 Nov 2010 12:17:37 EST]]> /Great_Meadow_The_1930 Tue, 23 Nov 2010 10:54:32 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Great_Meadow_The_1930 The Great Meadow (1930) is a historical novel by the Kentucky-born writer Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1881–1941). Set in the years between 1774 and 1781, it tells the story of Diony Hall, who migrates from Virginia to Kentucky, which was known as the "great meadow." Hall and her husband, Berk Jarvis, are inspired to move to Kentucky when they hear a speech by Daniel Boone in Virginia. Once there, however, Berk leaves Diony to seek revenge against Indians who attacked his family, and when he fails to return, Diony remarries.
Tue, 23 Nov 2010 10:54:32 EST]]> /Fox_John_Jr_1862-1919 Tue, 23 Nov 2010 10:39:48 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Fox_John_Jr_1862-1919 John Fox Jr. was one of Virginia's best-selling writers in the first decade of the twentieth century. He chronicled in popular fiction the customs and characters of southern Appalachia and produced two of the first million-selling novels in the United States. Though he enjoyed enormous commercial success, especially with The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), today Fox is regarded as a fairly sentimental practitioner of the local-color genre, a style of writing that foregrounds place and regionalism. Still, he is fondly celebrated by the southwestern Virginia town Big Stone Gap, where he resided much of his life. The Kentucky-born, Harvard-educated Fox embodied a contrast that he often explored in his novels: the insular culture of Appalachia set against a more sophisticated outside world.
Tue, 23 Nov 2010 10:39:48 EST]]> /Bond_Nelson_Slade_1908-2006 Tue, 23 Nov 2010 08:36:46 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Bond_Nelson_Slade_1908-2006 Nelson Slade Bond was one of the most prolific and well-known American writers of fantasy and science fiction stories from the 1930s until the 1950s. The author of more than 250 short stories, as well as several novels and novellas, he also wrote extensively for radio and television. In fact, his first successful story, "Mr. Mergenthwirker's Lobblies" (1937), appeared in three different mediums: in print, on radio, and on television. After the height of his writing career, Bond, complaining that "magazines and radio [were] dead, and TV sick," retreated from writing to run a public relations agency and deal in antique books from his home in Roanoke, Virginia.
Tue, 23 Nov 2010 08:36:46 EST]]> /Ausband_Stephen_C_1943- Thu, 18 Nov 2010 13:40:14 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Ausband_Stephen_C_1943- Stephen C. Ausband is a longtime professor of English at Averett University in Danville, Virginia, and an author whose works of nonfiction draw on his interests in the outdoors, history, literature, and myth. His published books diverge widely. Myth and Meaning, Myth and Order (1983) is a scholarly examination of the role of mythology in culture. He also has written a history of William Byrd II's 1728 survey of the border between Virginia and North Carolina, as well as a guide to outdoor recreation in the coastal regions of those two states.
Thu, 18 Nov 2010 13:40:14 EST]]> /Hagy_Alyson_1960- Mon, 27 Sep 2010 16:48:21 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Hagy_Alyson_1960- Alyson Hagy is a Virginia-reared fiction writer who, while best known for her short stories, has published two novels. Hagy's work shows the influence of a rural childhood, reflecting her fascination with challenging environments and harsh climes, and individuals' relationships with and within them. She currently lives and teaches in Laramie, Wyoming.
Mon, 27 Sep 2010 16:48:21 EST]]> /Hoffman_William_1925-2009 Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:39:24 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Hoffman_William_1925-2009 William Hoffman was the author of fourteen novels, four short-story collections, and two plays. His terrifying experience as a combat medic in Europe during World War II (1939–1945) dominated his earliest writing, including The Trumpet Unblown (1955) and Yancey's War (1966), which, according to poet George Garrett, are "at the highest rank of the American fiction coming out of World War II." Hoffman is also celebrated for novels that combine character-driven portraits of the South with action-mystery plots, and writing that joins tragic intensity with humor. Tales of murders and mysterious runaways—Tidewater Blood (1999) and Wild Thorn (2002), for instance—are fueled by Hoffman's sense of the macabre, while the backwoods of Virginia and his home state of West Virginia provide local color. Booklist has praised the writer's "evocative sense of place," but the Washington Post, in reviewing Lies (2005), wondered if Hoffman's prose hadn't become "swamped" in southern stereotypes.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:39:24 EST]]> /Casey_John_1939- Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:24:28 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Casey_John_1939- John Casey is a writer and translator who won the National Book Award for fiction in 1989 for his novel Spartina (1989), about a Rhode Island fisherman on the brink of financial ruin. A New England native, Casey has lived in Charlottesville since 1971 and is the Henry Hoyns Professor of English at the University of Virginia. In addition to Spartina, he is the author of An American Romance (1977), Testimony and Demeanor (1979), and The Half-Life of Happiness (1998). In 1983, he collected the work of a student who committed suicide into The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake. Casey has translated two novels from Italian into English, You're an Animal, Viskovitz! by Alessandro Boffa (2002) and Enchantments by Linda Ferri (2004), and has published widely in magazines ranging from the New Yorker to Sports Illustrated.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:24:28 EST]]> /Keyes_Frances_Parkinson_1885-1970 Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:55:46 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Keyes_Frances_Parkinson_1885-1970 Frances Parkinson Keyes was a prolific journalist, editor, memoirist, and biographer, but was most well known as a bestselling novelist. Problematic for some critics because of her popular and accessible prose, Keyes captivated fiction readers from the 1940s well into the 1960s, writing about politics, murder, religion, and life in the South. Today, however, few of her novels remain in print.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:55:46 EST]]> /Page_Thomas_Nelson_1853-1922 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:12:06 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Page_Thomas_Nelson_1853-1922 Thomas Nelson Page was the most prominent writer among several southern local colorists whose poems, stories, and novels idealized the Old South and served as a kind of imaginative precursor to Margaret Mitchell's epic novel Gone with the Wind (1936). In fact, few writers have so lauded Virginia's plantation class as Page, or had so great an impact on the ideology of both Virginia and the American South during the Reconstruction period (1865–1877) that followed the American Civil War (1861–1865). In the context of the great social upheaval following that war, stories like Page's hugely influential "Marse Chan" (1884) promoted the image of an Old South replete with gracious aristocrats and loyal servants and a New South fraught with turmoil but ready for reconciliation with the North. This nostalgic, revisionist version of history was embraced with gusto by both northern and southern readers, and its vestiges remain even today in popular concepts of the South.
Fri, 28 May 2010 15:12:06 EST]]> /Hamner_Earl_Jr_1923- Fri, 28 May 2010 09:50:14 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Hamner_Earl_Jr_1923- Earl Hamner Jr. is a writer of novels, television shows, and movies. Most notably, he created the popular semiautobiographical television series The Waltons (1972–1981), which was set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and based on his 1961 novel Spencer's Mountain and the 1963 film adaptation starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O'Hara. Hamner's own hardscrabble experiences growing up in a large family in depression-era Schuyler, Virginia, informed The Waltons, each episode of which famously ended with family members wishing one another goodnight.
Fri, 28 May 2010 09:50:14 EST]]> /Baldacci_David_1960- Mon, 17 May 2010 09:34:56 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Baldacci_David_1960- David Baldacci is a prolific and best-selling novelist who specializes in political and legal thrillers. His debut novel, Absolute Power (1996), about a murder involving the president of the United States, was adapted into a major film and helped to propel the Virginia native to further publishing success. In the years to follow, he produced thirteen consecutive best sellers, which have been published in more than forty languages in eighty countries, including Italy. Interestingly, early in his career, Baldacci adopted the pseudonym "David Ford" for the Italian editions of his books on the advice of his Italian publisher, who worried that otherwise he could not interest Italian readers.
Mon, 17 May 2010 09:34:56 EST]]> /Dillard_Annie_1945- Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:01:57 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Dillard_Annie_1945- Annie Dillard is a poet, essayist, and memoirist known for her intensely poetic and precise prose and her exploration of the natural environment. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dillard graduated from Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where she married her writing instructor and mentor while still an undergraduate. In 1975, she won the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for her collection of narrative essays, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The book, which brought Dillard quick and unexpected fame, was inspired by her stay in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and partly modeled on Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or Life in the Woods (1854), the subject of her master's thesis topic. Dillard taught in Washington State before joining the faculty of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1979, first as a scholar-in-residence and then, in 1983, as a full professor.
Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:01:57 EST]]> /Grisham_John_1955- Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:00:06 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Grisham_John_1955- John Grisham is the bestselling author of popular fiction and legal-themed thrillers whose work has been translated into more than thirty languages and adapted into numerous feature films. Many of Grisham's novels portray the legal profession as cynical and corrupt. His best-known novel, The Firm (1991), centers on a recent Harvard Law School graduate who, after learning that his firm is heavily involved in organized crime, risks his life to help the FBI indict his associates and their Mob bosses. In 1983, Grisham was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives as a Democrat, and served until 1990, while continuing to work at his law practice in Southaven, Mississippi. Since retiring from the law, Grisham has written, in addition to his thrillers, literary fiction and nonfiction, and has become involved in philanthropic efforts in Virginia, where he now lives part of the year.
Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:00:06 EST]]> /Cornwell_Patricia_1956- Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:33:13 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cornwell_Patricia_1956- Patricia Cornwell is the prolific author of best-selling crime novels, as well as a major history of Jack the Ripper. Her Kay Scarpetta crime novels pioneered the detailed use of forensic science in detective fiction and have received a number of major English-language awards in the genre, as well as many international honors. Although Cornwell now resides in Massachusetts, her literary success was a Virginia phenomenon and her most successful works are set there. She lived in Richmond for more than twenty years and gained an intimate knowledge of forensic science through her job at Richmond's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, where she worked occasionally in the morgue. Patricia Cornwell remains the city's most famous crime writer since Edgar Allan Poe—in Trace (2004), one of the Scarpetta novels, she even pays tongue-in-cheek homage to Poe in the character of Edgar Allan Pogue.
Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:33:13 EST]]> /Cather_Willa_1873-1947 Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:48:41 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cather_Willa_1873-1947 Willa Cather was a Virginia-born modernist writer who is best known for O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), two novels about Nebraska, where she attended school and spent much of her childhood. Her re-creation of what is now the Midwest is rooted in her own family's experience moving west from the Shenandoah Valley in 1883, and her writing is preoccupied with the larger American experiment of uprooting and then re-establishing civilization. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her novel One of Ours, about a Nebraska farmer's son, but her settings are not limited to the Great Plains. Cather wrote memorably about New York City, where she worked as a writer and as managing editor for McClure's magazine. Her masterpiece, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), is set in both New Mexico and France. And her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), takes place around her native Winchester, Virginia. Sapphira is considered to be in part autobiographical—the novel's slave-owning family and their abolitionist daughter were all based on Cather's maternal relatives—and her writing required a return to Virginia near the end of her life.
Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:48:41 EST]]> /Hale_Nancy_1908-1988 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:44:56 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Hale_Nancy_1908-1988 Nancy Hale was a prolific author of short stories, novels, nonfiction, plays, and memoirs. A regionalist writer who excelled at describing life in New England, New York City, and finally Virginia, she is best known for her third novel, The Prodigal Women (1942), which chronicles the lives of three young women in Boston, New York City, and a small Virginia town. An astute observer of everyday people, Hale frequently used female protagonists because, she said, they "puzzled" her.
Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:44:56 EST]]> /Vanauken_Sheldon_1914-1996 Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:37:02 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Vanauken_Sheldon_1914-1996 Sheldon Vanauken was a poet and novelist best known for his memoir A Severe Mercy (1977), about converting to Christianity and his wife's unexpected death at age forty. A less famous sequel, Under the Mercy, was published, to less acclaim, in 1985.
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:37:02 EST]]> /Trigiani_Adriana Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:32:57 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Trigiani_Adriana Adriana Trigiani is an award-winning author, playwright, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker. She is perhaps best known for her novels, beginning with Big Stone Gap (2000), the first in a series of stories set in the Appalachian region of southwestern Virginia. The stories are told from the perspective of a lovable character whose wry wit reflects the author's own. Her writing has been described as "heartwarming without being saccharine," and by New York Times reviewer Andrea Higbie "as comfortable as a mug of chamomile tea on a rainy Sunday." Her professional career began in 1985, when she wrote Secrets of the Lava Lamp for the Manhattan Theatre Club. In the succeeding decades, she has distinguished herself as an author, scriptwriter, director, and producer for both television and film.
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:32:57 EST]]> /Stuart_Dabney_1937- Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:29:38 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Stuart_Dabney_1937- Dabney Stuart, a professor emeritus of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, is a prolific writer of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism. Stuart has published nineteen books and been a contributor to numerous literary journals, including Poetry, Shenandoah, Southern Review, and Yale Review. Best known as a poet who covers a wide range of styles, Stuart's use of psychoanalytical theory and investigations into familial relationships are hallmarks of his writing.
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:29:38 EST]]> /Smith_Lee_1944- Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:20:15 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Smith_Lee_1944- Lee Smith, a Virginia-born and educated author, is a master of southern regional writing known for her ability to capture the voices of a wide variety of fictional characters. Her best-selling books have turned a national spotlight on her native southwestern Virginia, where most of her stories and twelve novels are set. She has won numerous major writing awards, including two O. Henry Awards (1979 and 1981) for her three collections of stories, the John Dos Passos Award for Literature (1987), the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction (1991), and the Lila Wallace–Readers Digest Writers' Award (1995). Two of her novels have been adapted for the stage, one in Virginia and one in New York. Characters from another form the basis for a traveling musical show. Smith retired after eighteen years of teaching at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
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