Literature

Novelist and historian Shelby Foote was born in Greenville, Mississippi, the only son of Shelby Dade and Lillian Rosenstock Foote. Foote grew up in the Delta town, where he was influenced by William Alexander Percy, a local author and the…

For a short time in the early 1960s, Jesse Hill Ford seemed to be establishing himself as an important new voice in southern literature. After winning an Atlantic Monthly prize in 1959 for his short story "The Surest Thing in…

Lucy Virginia French, poet and novelist, was born in Accomac County, Virginia, to a family of wealth and culture. Her parents were Mease W. Smith, an educator and lawyer, and Elizabeth Parker Smith, daughter of a wealthy merchant. She graduated…

Thomas O. Fuller, prominent African American church and civic leader and author in early twentieth-century Memphis, was born in Franklinton, North Carolina, on October 25, 1867. His father, J. Henderson Fuller, was a carpenter who bought his freedom from slavery…

Writer Nikki Giovanni expresses her version of the late twentieth-century African American experience through poetry and essays. Though her parents left Knoxville after her birth, Giovanni returned for summers with her grandparents and graduated from Knoxville's Austin High School before…

Albert V. Goodpasture, writer, editor, and Tennessee historian, was born on November 19, 1855, in Overton County. He attended school in Cookeville and New Middleton, and received his B.A. from East Tennessee University in 1875, having absorbed the view of…

In the early 1880s Westin A. Goodspeed, a successful Nashville-based publisher, discovered that volumes combining local history, biography, and state historical records had sold well in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and several other northern states. In the South, except for…

Twentieth-century novelist Caroline Gordon was born into the Kentucky line of the extensive Meriwether family in 1895. Exploration of the family's past and its evolution is a major theme of her fiction. She grew up at Merry Mont in Todd…

Internationally known author Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, on August 11, 1921, and died in a Tennessee hospital of complications from diabetes in February 1992. When he was a child, his family moved to his mother's hometown…

George Washington Harris, seminal southwestern humorist, was a Democrat and a Presbyterian, in that order. He was born in Pennsylvania but grew up in Knoxville. Although involved in many aspects of East Tennessee frontier development ranging from surveying to river…

Author of stories of mountain life, Mildred E. Haun was born in Hamblen County, on January 6, 1911, to James Enzor and Margaret Ellen Haun, but was raised in Haun Hollow in the Hoot Owl District of Cocke County in…

John Haywood, pioneer jurist and historian of early Tennessee history, was born in Halifax County, North Carolina in 1762, the son of prosperous tobacco producer Egbert Haywood. Despite limited educational opportunities on the colonial frontier, Haywood taught himself law and…

Stanley F. Horn, historian, businessman, and editor, was born at Neeley's Bend in Davidson County on a farm that had been in his family since the eighteenth century. Horn's mother instilled in him an interest in history as she read…

Louis Hughes, author and businessman, was born a slave in Virginia in 1832. Hughes remained in bondage over thirty years and spent most of that time in Tennessee. While still in slavery, Hughes secretly learned to read and write and…

Madison Jones, novelist, was born in Nashville and grew up on a farm located on Franklin Pike. After military service in and immediately after World War II, Jones completed a B.A. at Vanderbilt University, where he studied under Monroe Spears…

Known on the streets of early twentieth-century Memphis as "Lieutenant Lee," both for his army service as a lieutenant in World War I and as the lieutenant for the powerful African American capitalist and Republican Party leader Robert Church Sr.,…

Born in Memphis on November 28, 1948, to parents Richard and Jeanne Garretson Lightman, Alan P. Lightman is a distinguished author of scientific writings and critically acclaimed novels. Lightman grew up in Memphis, where he learned a love for both…

Before the Civil War, voluntary associations of women existed in Knoxville, Memphis, and Nashville, as well as in some rural areas. Most groups organized through local religious institutions to provide charitable services to the needy. With the establishment of these…

Where does Tennessee literature begin? With the poems and stories composed and handed down orally by the Native Americans long before the white explorers and settlers came? With the accounts of the Spanish expeditions of Hernando de Soto and Juan…

Andrew Nelson Lytle, writer, editor, critic, and teacher, was born the day after Christmas, 1902--like a "wet fire-cracker," his grandmother remarked. He would spend nearly the rest of the century pondering the remote world into which he had been born:…