“The Recluse Novelist of Lee Circle”,Special Collections

An August 6, 1977, article in the States-Item, a New Orleans daily newspaper, features Murrell Edmunds, a reclusive novelist, poet, and playwright. Newspaper reporter Walter Isaacson interviewed seventy-nine-year-old Edmunds, a former Virginia lawyer, in a cramped room on the ninth floor of a local YMCA; the novelist had been living there quietly for the past sixteen years. Citing his nervous dispostion, Edmunds told the reporter that "it's better for my health to be obscure."

Citation: Papers of Murrell Edmunds, MSS 5989-ar, Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.