Authors in History

On January 30, 1979, 130 million people tuned in to watch the conclusion of the ABC miniseries Roots. For eight consecutive nights, viewers had been enthralled by the story of a slave, Kunte Kinte, from his abduction in West Africa, up through his death on an American plantation.

The real-life story of Roots eventually led to Henning, Tennessee, where Kinte’s great-great great-great grandson Alex Haley lived before famously novelizing the slave trade. Haley departed Henning at age fifteen to attend Elizabeth City Teachers College, in hopes of following in his college professor father’s footsteps.

However, school did little to further Haley’s writing career, and in 1939, he dropped out, eventually joining the Coast Guard. There, he earned extra cash by writing love letters for his crew-mates, and learned to stave off boredom by writing adventure stories. The writing practice also led to a promotion, labeling him as the Coast Guard’s first Chief Journalist.

After twenty years of service, Haley left the Guard, and started a career as a full-time writer. He freelanced biographical articles for several years, most notably with Playboy magazine. His interviews with Miles Davis, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Johnny Carson, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Muhammad Ali were successful enough to be eventually compiled into an anthology, published after his death.

Haley’s interview with Malcolm X proved to be especially valuable, as his first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, evolved over a series of intense interviews with the legendary Black Muslim leader. By 1977, the book sold over six million copies, even though members of Malcolm X’s family and the Nation of Islam accused Haley of fictionalizing several aspects of Malcolm’s life.

After the success of Malcolm X, Haley stumbled across the names of his maternal great-grandparents while going through the National Archives’ post-Civil War records. He then embarked on an eleven-year journey, tracking slave and ship records, eventually traveling to West Africa, where he met a griot, oral historian, who told him Kunte Kinte’s story. Haley relayed the legend into novel version of Roots, which sold more than a million copies in its first year, and won a special Pulitzer Prize, as well as the 1977 National Book Award.

However, the griot who supposedly recounted Haley’s family history quickly came under intense scrutiny. Critics claimed that the old man was a well-known trickster, who conned Haley by telling him the story he wanted to hear. Genealogists and historians revisited Haley’s research, and after tracing slave records, concluded that none of Haley’s claims were true. Nevertheless, Haley stood by the story, and even donated enough money to fund the village’s new mosque. Additionally, he and his brothers established the Kinte Foundation, which collects and preserves African-American genealogy records.

Further deepening the Roots controversy, additional reports surfaced that claimed the novel plagiarized The African by Harold Courlander, published years before Roots. Despite Haley’s claim that any appropriation of passages had been unintentional, presiding U.S. District Judge Robert J. Ward said that Haley “perpetrated a hoax on the public,” and Haley settled the claim for $650,000.

After the controversies, Haley issued a post-trial statement, acknowledging and regretting that “various materials” from Courlander’s novel had “found their way into” Roots. He also acknowledged that Roots was primarily a work of fiction, rather than a true genealogical study.

Amidst the hullabaloo, Haley’s work inspired a new found public interest in genealogy, and in 1979, ABC produced the Roots: The Next Generation. The sequel, less acclaimed and lower-rated than the original, continued the family’s history and culminated with Haley’s visit to West Africa.

Roots also cemented Haley as a successful television producer. In 1980, he used that experience to parlay his boyhood memories into the television series “Palmerstown, USA.” However, the series was cancelled after one season.

Despite claiming that the fame was “nice,” Haley eventually tired of the constant scrutiny, and even walked away from a million-dollar Malcolm X project in order to escape sparring producers. He then completely abandoned the Hollywood lifestyle to return to Tennessee, where he purchased a small farm neighboring the Museum of Appalachia.

In addition to his television work, Haley completed a book on Henning’s town history, as well as a biography of Frank Willis, the security guard who discovered the Watergate break-in. His only other work of fiction was the novella A Different Kind of Christmas, which echoed Roots’ indictment of slavery but failed to reach the same cultural apex.

In his later years, Haley became a noted public speaker, traveling across the United States to tell his family’s stories. Even those who decried Roots commended Haley’s speaking style, and after his death, Jacqueline Trescott of The Washington Post hailed his “deep, velvety voice” and ease at a lectern. He continued his public appearances for twelve years, until he succumbed to a heart attack shortly before delivering a speech in Seattle.

Posthumously, writer David Stevens used Haley’s writings to complete the novel Queen in 1993, about Haley’s paternal grandmother, as well as Mama Flora’s Family, which told the fictionalized story of a girl born to a sharecropping family in Mississippi.

After Haley’s death, his farm in Norris was sold to the Children’s Defense Fund, which calls it the Alex Haley Farm and uses it as a training and retreat center. His body returned to Henning, where, after seven generations, the story of Roots finally ended.

Henry Sydnor Harrison was born in Tennessee, graduated from Columbia, and served on the staff of the Richmond Times‐Dispatch (1900–1910). His later life was devoted mainly to fiction, the best of his seven novels being Queed (1911) and V.V.’s Eyes (1913). The first, dramatized by Gilbert Emery (1921), is a complacently realistic story of American city life, concerned with a young “revolutionary sociologist” whose conviction of his mission in life is broken by contact with actuality when he becomes a newspaper reporter. V.V.’s Eyes, about an enthusiastic young doctor, V. Vivian, who attempts to reform the selfish daughter of a factory owner, includes pleas for improved factory conditions, child‐labor legislation, and women’s rights.

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 a large family of strong, independent mountain farmers whose roots could be traced back to 1779. Planning to become a granny woman/midwife and needing more education, sixteen-year-old Haun traveled to Franklin County to live with relatives and attend high school. After graduation in 1931 she attended Vanderbilt University, became interested in literature, and enrolled in John Crowe Ransom’s writing course. In this class she used the songs and stories handed down through oral tradition in tales of her home and people. Haun’s narrator was Mary Dorthula White, a granny woman born, coincidentally, on January 6, 1847 (Old Christmas), a date that mountaineers believed ensured eternal life. Encouraged by Ransom, Haun continued to write stories after graduation while teaching high school in Franklin. In 1937 she completed an M.A. in English at Vanderbilt, studying under Ransom and Donald Davidson, both of whom signed her unpublished thesis, “Cocke County Ballads and Songs.”

The only collection of fiction published by Haun, The Hawk’s Done Gone (1940), includes several of the stories she had written in college. This work consists of a group of stories linked by the narrator Mary Dorthula White and members of several families. It combines modern realism with ancient beliefs and superstitions, creating a disturbing, yet intriguing look at mountain life in the period from the Civil War to 1940. The themes of witchcraft, infanticide, incest, and miscegenation reveal a dark side of the author. But amid the talk of spirits and age-old prejudices is Haun’s use of dialect, mountain beliefs, and songs. The collection is not quite a novel, but more than a series of stories. Herschel Gower edited and published posthumously ten additional stories by Haun in 1968 (The Hawk’s Done Gone and Other Stories).

From 1942 to 1943 Haun served as book editor for the Nashville Tennessean and later as an editorial assistant to Allen Tate on the Sewanee Review, 1944-46, occasionally returning to Cocke County to care for her aging mother while her brothers were in military service during World War II. From 1950 to 1963 Haun worked as an editor and information specialist for the Arnold Engineering Development Center in Tullahoma, writing speeches, news releases, correspondence courses in engineering and technical subjects for military personnel, training manuals, and featured articles of the Department of Agriculture. She was sent to Europe and the Near East in 1965 to report on agricultural projects under American foreign aid. At the end of 1965, a serious illness forced her to return to Nashville for hospitalization and treatment. Haun died on December 20, 1966, in Washington, D.C., after months of hospitalization, and is buried in Morristown, next to her mother in the Haun family plot.

Bowen Ingram was the pen name for Mildred Rebecca Prewett Ingram, who was born in Gordonsville, a town named for her ancestor, John Gordon. Always interested in writing, Ingram published her first poem at age 12. She married Daniel Taylor Ingram, Commandant of Castle Heights Military Academy in Lebanon, and began to write for publication after her three children reached school age. Five stories appeared in the New Yorker; one short story, “Death of a Slave,” became the basis for her novel, Milbry. Ingram spent the last several years of her life living on her daughter’s farm in Williamson County, the place where she had lived with her sister in a log house.

Two mysteries surround the life and career of Randall Jarrell: how he was able to accomplish so much in half a century, and whether or not his death at age fifty-one was accident or suicide.

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, to Owen and Anna Campbell Jarrell, the family moved to California when Randall was only a year old. Owen Jarrell worked as an assistant to a children’s photographer, and later opened his own studio, but financial difficulties eventually led to marital dissolution. Randall, his younger brother Charles, and his mother moved back to Nashville at his maternal uncle’s request. Anna Jarrell began teaching English at a secretarial school, and Randall held his first job as a newspaper boy. He also sold Christmas wrapping paper door-to-door. The future man of letters was an excellent student, and fell in love with language through his readings at the Carnegie Library.

Jarrell earned his Bachelor’s degree (1935) and Master’s (1938) from Vanderbilt University, where he studied with Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom, and was mentored by Allen Tate. Ransom left Vanderbilt for Kenyon College in Ohio, and Jarrell followed, working there as an instructor. During his two years at Kenyon, Jarrell met and roomed with poet Robert Lowell and established an enduring friendship with novelist Peter Taylor. Jarrell later accepted a teaching position at the University of Texas, Austin, another appointment of many that earned him positions at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of North Carolina and University of Cincinnati, and visiting professorships at Princeton, and the University of Illinois.

Beginning in the 1940’s and into the following decade, Jarrell served as literary editor for The Nation, and as poetry critic for Partisan Review and Yale Review. He held the position of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1956 to 1958, and was a member of the editorial board of American Scholar for eight years, beginning in 1957.

The pivotal experience for Jarrell came in 1942 when he volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Force. He began training as a flying cadet but failed to qualify, and then became a celestial training navigator in Tucson, Arizona. His exposure to military life was catalyst for much of his early work, including what is arguably his most anthologized poem, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” a sparse but powerful five-line piece about the dangerous occupation of a B-17 gunner who hung upside down in a plexiglass sphere to engage enemies attacking the plane.
Jarrell’s first book of poetry, Blood for a Stranger, published after he began his four-year military stint, established his position of importance in the American literary scene. His next two books, Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and Losses (1948) confirmed Jarrell as a major poetic voice. Not only was he respected as a poet, but Jarrell made a name for himself as a blunt and often feared critic through his biting reviews in major literary magazines, and in a book of essays, Poetry and the Age (1953). He worked successfully as a translator, short fiction writer, and novelist. Jarrell, in his final years, even wrote two children’s books, The Bat Poet (1964) and The Animal Family (1965), the latter illustrated by Maurice Sendak.

Among his many accolades: a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Levinson Prize, Oscar Blumenthal Prize, National Institute of Arts and Letters Grant, and a National Book Award for The Woman at the Washington Zoo in 1960.

Shortly after publication of his final poetry collection, The Lost World (1965), Jarrell suffered from mental illness, one moment experiencing complete joy and the next, depression. He attempted suicide in 1965 by slashing his wrist. Apparently recovering, he returned to teaching that fall. While admitted to a hospital in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for therapy on his injured wrist, Jarrell left at dusk for a walk along a busy, nearby highway. He was struck there by an automobile and died instantly. The coroner’s ruling was accidental death, but many of his closest friends believed Jarrell committed suicide. Jarrell’s friend, the poet Robert Lowell, expressed this belief in a letter to fellow poet Elizabeth Bishop: “There’s a small chance [that Jarrell’s death] was an accident … [but] I think it was suicide, and so does everyone else, who knew him well.”

In what can only be considered a short but fruitful life, Jarrell left behind an impressive legacy: eight collections of poetry, influential criticism, a novel, numerous translations of Beckstein, Grimm, and Chekhov, and two books for children.

In Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life, William Pritchard states that Jarrell will be remembered as one of the best American lyric poets “for his brilliantly engaging and dazzling criticism, and for his passionate defence … of writing and reading poems and fiction.” Covering the memorial service held in Jarrell’s honor on February 28, 1966, the New York Times quoted Robert Lowell, who credited Jarrell with writing “the best poetry in English about the Second World War,” and described his friend as “the most heartbreaking poet of our time.”

May Justus’s stories revolve around her mountain heritage and upbringing. Such stories as “The House in No-End Hollow” and “Dixie Decides” evoke the same rustic childhood that she experienced in rural Tennessee in the early 1900s.

Justus was born on May 12, 1898, in Del Rio, Tennessee. Her father was a schoolteacher, and the family moved around quite frequently but always stayed close to the Appalachian Mountains that helped shape Justus’s character and writing. “For I feel at home only in the mountains,” she has said in several interviews. She eventually attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville where she earned her Bachelors in Teaching. Early in her career, she grew fond of writing children’s literature that explored the mountain folklore of her youth.

Her first children’s book—Peter Pocket—was published in 1927, followed by Gabby Gaffer in 1929.  The story of Gabby Gaffer is pure whimsy, dealing with a peculiar, yet charming, stranger who makes his way into the mountain community of Unlucky Village, but proves he can change that.

After her first publications, Justus continued to generate works, all while teaching. Her students inspired Justus to write more and more—and she did, dedicating countless stories to them. Justus’s love of children even led her to begin teaching handicapped students in her own home. After her retirement, Justus continued her work with children, operating a story-and-song program from her home and maintaining a children’s library in her attic for twenty years.

Justus won a bevy of awards for her literary achievements, including the Julia Ellsworth Ford Prize for Gabby Gaffer’s New Shoes in 1935, and the Boy’s Club Award in 1950 for Luck for Little Lihu, cementing her place as an adored children’s author. She passed away on November 7, 1989, at the age of 91. Posthumously, her Alma Mater established the May Justus Collection, housing bibliographies of all of her books, anthologies containing her short poems, photographs, manuscripts, sixteen handwritten letters, and other materials concerning her personal history. The establishment hopes to keep the work of Justus alive and thriving, and help it reach and touch as many children as possible—something Justus would surely appreciate.