Literature

Richard Marius, historian and novelist, was born in Martel, the son of a Greek father and a Methodist mother from Bradley County. Looking back on his childhood, Marius later identified three elements that contributed to his writing career: a love…

Cormac McCarthy, author of eight novels and two dramas, spent his childhood in Knoxville, where he graduated from Catholic High School in 1951 and attended the University of Tennessee. Although he never received a degree, he left the university with…

Tennessee suffragist, temperance activist, publisher, and author Elizabeth Avery Meriwether was born in Bolivar on January 19, 1824. Her father Nathan Avery was a physician and farmer, while her mother Rebecca Rivers Avery was the daughter of a Virginia planter.…

Emma Bell Miles, artist, naturalist, and author of The Spirit of the Mountains (1905) as well as poems, stories, and essays, was born in Evansville, Indiana, on October 19, 1879, to schoolteachers Benjamin Franklin and Martha Ann Mirick Bell. She…

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Mary Noailles Murfree depicted the scenery and people of the Tennessee mountains for a national audience. At a time when local color fiction was much in vogue throughout the country, she came…

John A. Murrell, a thief and counterfeiter, spent much of his short life in prison and was a notorious outlaw in antebellum Middle Tennessee. In 1844 he died in Pikeville at the age of thirty-eight, shortly after completing nine years…

Herman C. Nixon, historian, political scientist, and member of the Southern Agrarians, was born in Merrellton, Alabama, in 1886. He was educated at the Alabama State Normal School, the Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University), and the University of Chicago.…

Frank L. Owsley was a noted Vanderbilt University historian and apologist for the Old South. "The purpose of my life," he wrote to a colleague in 1932, "is to undermine . . . the entire Northern myth from 1820 to…

A group of black women, wives of prominent black leaders in Nashville's church, business, and professional arenas, organized the Phillis Wheatley Club in 1895. The club, established its headquarters at the AME Publishing House on the public square in Nashville,…

Samuel F. Pickering Jr. was born in Nashville, attended Montgomery Bell Academy and the University of the South, and took advanced degrees at Cambridge and Princeton on his way to becoming a scholar of children's literature. In addition to scholarly…

Wyatt Prunty is the author of six collections of poetry: The Times Between (1982), What Women Know, What Men Believe (1986), Balance as Belief (1989), The Run of the House (1993), Since the Noon Mail Stopped (1997), and Unarmed and…

J. G. M. Ramsey made an indelible mark on the political, economic, and social development of antebellum East Tennessee. He was a physician, public official, religious leader, banker, railroad advocate, scholar, and staunch secessionist, one of the most accomplished East…

Tennessee's preeminent poet and arguably the South's most influential literary critic and teacher, John Crowe Ransom was born in Pulaski and educated at Vanderbilt, where he later taught English and became the leading member of the Fugitives, whose magazine contained…

Ishmael S. Reed, contemporary African American satirist, poet, playwright, and essayist, was born in Chattanooga, on February 22, 1938, and lives in Oakland, California. Having left Chattanooga as a child and grown up in Buffalo, New York, he attended public…

James D. Richardson, prominent turn-of-the-century Democratic leader, U.S. congressman, and nationally recognized historian and editor, was born in Rutherford County on March 10, 1843. His grandparents, James and Mary Watkins Richardson, had moved to Jefferson in 1814, and his father,…

Novelist and essayist Evelyn Scott was born Elsie Dunn in Clarksville on January 17, 1893, the only child of Seely and Maude Thomas Dunn. After living in Clarksville as a young child, she moved to New Orleans and enrolled in…

Writer and editor Randall Stewart was born in Fayetteville in 1896. In 1898 his family moved to Nashville, where he grew up and was educated through his undergraduate years at Vanderbilt, from which he was graduated in 1917 as the…

Novelist and short story writer Thomas S. Stribling became the first Tennessean to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature. Stribling was born in Clifton on March 4, 1881, the son of Christopher and Amelia Waits Stribling. After abandoning teaching and…

Allen Tate, teacher, writer, poet, and critic, was associated with Tennessee for most of his life and lived in the state for long periods, especially during his college years at Vanderbilt University (1918-23) and during his last years in Nashville…

Antoinette Elizabeth Taylor, historian, was the first scholar to study woman suffrage in the South. Born on June 10, 1917, in Columbus, Georgia, she received a B.A. from the University of Georgia in 1938 and an M.A. from the University…