Born in Corinth, Mississippi in 1931, and later moving to Paducah, Kentucky, Knight was one of seven children in a low-income family. Dropping out of school after the eighth grade, he soon realized there were few job opportunities for a young, relatively uneducated black man. His despair led him to drug addiction. In an effort…
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 of the English language, the experiences of a vividly remembered childhood, and his profession as…
A native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Meacham was an attorney and judge who also wrote novels set in India. Meacham graduated from the University of Chattanooga, where he received his A.B. in 1935, and later attended Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee, where he earned his law degree in 1937. Meacham practiced law in Chattanooga from 1937-1972,…
Elizabeth Avery Meriwether (1824-1916), Tennessee suffragist, temperance activist, publisher and author, 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. Financial problems led the family to move to Memphis around 1835. Nathan’s death in…
Not every true Tennessee author has to be born and bred in the state. Some were raised elsewhere, but stumbled into Tennessee at the prospect of a job or scholarship, and discovered much more about themselves. That is how Jim Wayne Miller found himself in Tennessee. Miller was born in Leicester, North Carolina, in 1936.…
Steady rhythm and rules were driving forces not only behind Wilmer Mills’ daily life, but also his poetry, as he thought of “narrative, metrical, old-fashioned poetry as a kind of non-mechanized farming, using outmoded metrical devices to create an organic gardening on the page.” Mills’ affection for manual labor began in his youth, when his…
