Authors in History

Born in Arkansas, John Fergus Ryan called Memphis, Tennessee home for more than 40 years, and graduated from Memphis State University in 1957. He was the author of two plays, The Minor Poet and Doctor Holocaust, and three novels, The Redneck Bride, The Little Brothers of St. Mortimer, and Watching. Some of his work, including The Redneck Bride, has been adapted into screenplays. He also appeared in Milos Forman’s film The People vs. Larry Flynt.

By the time George Addison Scarbrough received his high school diploma in 1935, near age twenty, his family had moved more than a dozen times. His father, William Oscar Scarbrough, was an itinerant sharecropper forced on a regular basis to load his large clan in a wagon and find farm work on land always owned by someone else. This meager existence demanded great sacrifice from his wife, Louise Anabel McDowell Scarbrough, and their seven children: Lee, Edith, George, Charles (Pete), Bill, Blaine, and Kenneth (Kim). They lived in hand-me-down housing that Scarbrough describes in his unpublished journals as “more shacks than homes, more slatted cribs than shacks,” in which there was little or no privacy and certainly not places one could call home.

While these meanderings must have seemed constant for the family, they really covered very little ground. Scarbrough was born October 20, 1915, on the Harrison Place, a farm near Patty Station, six miles from the Polk County seat of Benton, Tennessee. The lower end of the Appalachian Mountain range, a permanent fixture that proved constant in the writer’s life and work, is visible in the distance. The rivers that would one day be so influential in Scarbrough’s poetry—the Hiwassee and Ocoee—are also nearby. This region of his early life, limited in scope to the counties of Polk and McMinn, would eventually become the land he tilled, not only as the son of a sharecropper but also as a poet.

Interest in the written word came at a very early age for Scarbrough, as did his ability to understand language. The cracks in the walls of his many homes were insulated with old newspapers. From these World War I-era headlines Scarbrough’s mother taught him to recognize letters and to read before he ever entered grammar school. Knowledge proved to be, however, a two-edged sword, severing him from his peers, and alienating him from much of his family, who never understood the little boy who would rather spend his spare time reading books and writing.

Writing his own poetry made Scarbrough even more interested in reading, and he consumed everything available to him. Of course, the Bible was required reading: he did not, however, read it for religious instruction but for the beauty of words, and he recognized for the first time poetry that did not rhyme. Scarbrough became responsible for his own education; the natural world was a great source of fascination during his early years and provided a cosmology for the mature poet.

Because of constant moves from one farm to another, and because schools closed down regularly whenever childhood diseases made their rounds through the community, Scarbrough finally finished high school later than most students and began talking of college. It was a subject that his father found repulsive. Nevertheless, the father’s attitude about higher learning did not deter Scarbrough from pursuing more education. After graduation from high school, Scarbrough borrowed money—ten dollars each from twelve local men—and went to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in the fall of 1935. After only a year at UT, Scarbrough was forced by financial difficulties to leave the university and begin farming again.

With the assistance of several influential people who recognized the young man’s talent, Scarbrough secured the first ever literary fellowship to the University of the South, an experience that was both positive and negative for the young writer. Out of place among the more aristocratic students, Scarbrough was labeled a “covite,” one who came from the coves of Tennessee. Coupled with the ridicule was deep guilt; for the first time, Scarbrough was living in what seemed, at first, ideal conditions: books at his fingertips, learned professors, and no want of necessities such as food. Adding to this unease was the knowledge that Scarbrough’s accident-prone father was recuperating from a broken back that he suffered after falling out of the barn, and that his inability to work put an even greater strain on the family’s survival.

During his two years at the University of the South, the Sewanee Review published a selection of Scarbrough’s poetry. In a section titled “Tennessee Tomes,” editor William S. Knickerbocker chose an unusually large number of his poems—fifteen—as a feature in one of the 1941 issues.

Although Scarbrough had opportunity to learn from outstanding teachers such as Tudor Long and George Baker, and to work for a year as an office boy and proof-reader in the Sewanee Review office under Andrew Lytle, his departure from the school was not pleasant. After speaking bluntly with a professor, Scarbrough learned he would lose the fellowship and be forced to work in the cafeteria to cover the cost of tuition. He refused and returned home.

In 1947, Scarbrough earned his B.A. degree from Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee. Seven years later, he earned the M.A. from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, with a creative thesis. He began pursuing a Ph.D. at UT, but never finished, the catalyst of a lifelong regret.

Scarbrough left the confusing years of his formal training with an even greater desire to write. That desire led him to the Writers’ Workshop at the State University of Iowa in 1957. Still trying to find quality in the educational system, Scarbrough was again disappointed and simply completed the program without any real investment. Disgusted, for the most part, with the time wasted trying to learn at centers of higher education, Scarbrough began an intensive personal effort to become a better writer. By the time he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Scarbrough was already an established poet with three books to his credit: Tellico Blue in 1949, The Course is Upward in 1951, and, in 1956, Summer So-Called, which was mentioned in the 1957 Encyclopaedia Brittanica Book of the Year; the notation by Harrison Hayford was the first in which Scarbrough was included with well-known poets of his day, including John Ashberry, Donald Hall, and Adrienne Rich.

When not attending a university on a regular basis, Scarbrough was still in the classroom as a teacher. His first job was in 1937; he earned $55 per month at an area high school. Scarbrough felt most comfortable in the college setting. He taught at Hiwassee College in Madisonville, Tennessee, from 1965 to 1967, and at Chattanooga College during the 1968 academic year. By the end of his career, eighteen years in all, Scarbrough’s mother had become ill and needed his attention. He gave up teaching to be with his mother, and became a constant companion and nurse for the final fifteen years of her life.

A trio of books in less than a decade by a nationally-known publisher, E.P. Dutton, was quite an accomplishment, but it was twenty-one years before Scarbrough’s fourth book, New and Selected Poems, was published. That long break between volumes was not idle time. Scarbrough published widely in literary magazines and wrote reviews which reveal the essayist exploring his own ideas about poetry by examining the work of others.

Not only was Scarbrough’s poetry becoming more diverse in relation to subject matter and ideas, the next book also marked a change in style. While the first three books were somewhat dependent on established, traditional forms, the new poems in New and Selected are predominantly free verse. The recurrent attention to place and family is present, but the poems in his fourth collection are more deeply personal.

Following publication of New and Selected, Scarbrough’s next venture was the release of his only novel, A Summer Ago. His final volume of poetry was 1989’s Invitation to Kim, which garnered Scarbrough a nomination for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, a flirt with national recognition that left the poet with mixed emotions. After the announcement that he had not won (in fact, he was not a finalist), Scarbrough again felt that familiar rejection that long plagued his self-prescribed tentative position in the world of letters. Despite feeling overlooked, the Pulitzer nomination actually capped a career marked by recognition: two Carnegie Fund Grants, in 1956 and 1975; the 1961 Borestone Mountain Award; the Mary Rugeley Ferguson Poetry Award from the Sewanee Review in 1964; a P.E.N. American Branch Grant in 1975; an Authors’ League Fund Grant in 1976; the Sheena Albanese Memorial Prize by Spirit magazine, and the Governor’s Outstanding Tennessean Award in Literature, both in 1978.

Even in his young adulthood and middle-age years, Scarbrough did not venture far from the Eastanalle corner of Tennessee. After his father’s death, he and his mother resided for a short time in nearby Anderson County, and they eventually settled, in 1963, on Darwin Lane in Oak Ridge, where he resided until his death.

Scarbrough’s final years were marked by a renewed scholarly interest in his work and important recognition. The accolades came in various forms, including regular appearances of his work in top journals, such as Poetry, The Southern Review, and Virginia Quarterly. The annual Literary Festival, held on campus at Emory and Henry College, Emory, Virginia, October 21-22, 1999, was in his honor, and the resulting Spring 2000 Iron Mountain Review was dedicated to Scarbrough’s work. Asheville Poetry Review editor Keith Flynn chose Scarbrough for inclusion in the special millennial Spring/Summer 2000 issue, which focused on “Ten Great Neglected Poets of the Twentieth Century.” The section devoted to Scarbrough contained a sampling of his work, an interview, and selected criticism. Of the ten poets chosen for this honor, Scarbrough was the only one still alive. In April of 2001, Scarbrough was recognized by The Fellowship of Southern Writers at the biennial Arts and Education Council Conference on Southern Literature in Chattanooga and received the prestigious James Still Award for Writing of the Appalachian South, earned previously by Charles Frazier in 1999 and originally by James Still in 1997. Also in 2001, Scarbrough received the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine for three poems in the July, 2000 issue. More recent honors included the Knoxville Writers’ Guild Career Achievement Award in 2003, and Scarbrough’s induction into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame in October 2008, less than two months before his death.

But perhaps two recognitions later in life meant most to Scarbrough. Poetry magazine assembled The Poetry Anthology: 1912-2002, and chose one of Scarbrough’s poems for inclusion in the book designed to celebrate the best selections appearing in the ninety years of the magazine’s existence. “Han Shan Fashions a Myth” shares pages with the work of the greatest poetic names of the Twentieth Century, including T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, and Wallace Stevens. In an interview with the Oak Ridger newspaper, Scarbrough said, “I am where I always wanted to be—considered among the major American poets.” And that doctorate that eluded Scarbrough in his youth was finally realized; Lincoln Memorial University—the school where the poet earned his undergraduate degree—conferred upon Scarbrough in 2005 an honorary Doctor of Letters.

Following more than eight decades of a literary career marked by five books of poetry and a novel, Scarbrough left behind a future legacy. Two more collections of poetry, tentatively titled Under the Lemon Tree—his deeply personal and profound poems told with the help of alter-ego Han Shan—and On a Blue Theme, await posthumous publication.

Evelyn Scott, who came of age in New Orleans, began her literary career as a poet but expanded into other literary genres, including short stories, essays, novels, memoir, and drama. She was an important figure in modernism, an artistic movement that flourished in the United States and Europe during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps best known for her trilogy of novels—The Narrow House (1921), Narcissus (1922), and The Golden Door (1925)—Scott railed against the conventions of southern culture. She was particularly critical of traditional ideals of southern white womanhood in her life and work.

Early Life

The only child of Seely and Maude Thomas Dunn, Evelyn Scott was born Elsie Dunn in Clarksville, Tennessee, on January 17, 1893. Seely Dunn lost money in various business schemes and, as the family’s money ran out, they moved from Kentucky to Indiana to Missouri before heading to New Orleans. In 1901, the Dunn family moved to New Orleans, seeking financial assistance from Evelyn’s paternal grandfather, Oliver Milo Dunn, who was superintendent of the New Orleans & Mobile division of the Central Illinois Railroad.

Scott’s education came mostly through the occasional private tutor and self-directed readings; brief stints at Newcomb Preparatory School and Newcomb Art School rounded out her intellect. Surrounded by books in the family’s library, Scott found it difficult to focus on one discipline. She yearned to write, paint, act, and study with Anna Pavlova, a Russian ballerina. Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Marx informed her philosophy.

The tense relationship between Scott’s parents made for turbulence in her teenage years. Seely Dunn found many opportunities for extramarital affairs in the permissive culture of New Orleans, while Scott’s mother, Maude, struggled to maintain the appearance of propriety. Defying her society’s expectations of the southern belle, Scott scoffed at the importance of virginity and was both repelled by and attracted to the men in her social milieu. Scott’s progressive ideas often offended her mother’s sense of decorum. Maude Dunn was mortified, for example, when Scott wrote a letter to the editor of the Times-Picayune advocating the legalization and regulation of prostitution to prevent the spread of venereal disease.

Despite her rejection of its traditional values, New Orleans inspired much of Scott’s early work. She published her first short story in the New Orleans Times-Picayune under the pen name Hiram Hagan Beck. The city’s steamy environments informed her next major work, a novel now lost, about a friendship between a prostitute and a young woman. Scott sent this novel to Dorothy Dix, a fellow native of Clarksville who also moved to New Orleans. Dix worked as a writer for the Times-Picayune and served as a role model of a working writer who also advocated women’s suffrage.

At seventeen, Scott joined the Louisiana Women’s Suffrage Party and served as its secretary. She quit, however, when she learned the group’s agenda was not as radical as her own. Other members of the party, for example, disagreed with her advocacy for outcasts and African Americans, as well as her embrace of Marxism.

By age twenty, Scott felt social pressure to marry and become a mother. While she sought to live a life of the mind, her parents urged her to marry a man who would support her, thus relieving them of a financial burden. Despite her family’s precarious financial situation, Scott rejected the option of traditional marriage, choosing instead to run away with an older, married man, Frederick Creighton Wellman. Though Wellman’s wife refused to grant him a divorce, Scott imagined their lives together as a grand adventure, during which she would be free of social codes, pressures, and the strict eye of her mother. On December 26, 1913, the couple boarded a train for New York City, where they assumed the names Evelyn and Cyril K. Scott, a married couple. Thereafter Elsie Dunn was known as Evelyn Scott.

Because Scott was just shy of her twenty-first birthday, Wellman broke the law by crossing state lines with her. When his wife threatened to sue, and Seely Dunn employed several agencies to locate the couple, they fled to Brazil, where they lived from 1913 to 1919. While in Brazil, Scott gave birth to a son, Creighton, and developed her literary skills. The couple returned to the United States in 1919 but continued to travel extensively. Her relationship with Wellman ended, however, in 1922.

Writing Career

Evelyn Scott published the majority of her work during the 1920s. The Narrow House was published in 1921; Narcissus and The Golden Door followed in rapid succession. This trilogy was followed by another consisting of the novels Migrations (1927), The Wave (1929), and A Calendar of Sin (1931). Scott spent the 1930s living in New York City until her marriage to British writer John Metcalfe. They lived in Canada and England until the 1950s, when she returned to the United States. Scott wrote her last book, The Shadow of the Hawk, in 1941. She died August 3, 1963.

Though critically acclaimed, Scott was not generally recognized as a southern writer. More often, she was seen as a modernist; her work was published alongside James Joyce and T.S. Elliot in Egoist, Poetry, Dial, and other literary journals. Key themes of her work include orthodoxy and rebellion, the oppressive nature of the family, and the artist at war with society. Other writers championed her depictions of mixed-race characters as astute. Scott experimented with imagism, expressionism, stream of consciousness, and the psychological novel. She was an important literary and intellectual figure whose legacy was rediscovered at the end of the twentieth century.

The Tennessee riverside town of Clifton is home of author Thomas Sigismund Stribling, described accurately by reviewer Richard Moore as an “odd duck.” Stribling was the author of sixteen books, a multitude of articles, and is best known for his novel trilogy that explored political and social injustices, and included The Store, winner of the 1933 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The T.S. Stribling Museum, in Clifton, presents the story of an eclectic man, and offers an eye-opening experience into a mind that entertained the imaginations of many readers. Cluttered book upon book, the museum highlights a persona of detail and suspense, but also reminds visitors of how fortune Tennessee was to have been represented in the literary world by a man born and raised in the heart of the Volunteer State.

Stribling was born on March 4, 1881, in Clifton, and during the summers spent time with his grandparents on a Lauderdale County, Alabama, family farm, the setting of many of his stories. After graduating high school, he attended Florence Normal School—now known as the University of North Alabama. He became a lawyer and subsequently left that career to move home to Tennessee. He began a life as an author of odd consequence. He wrote for the Chattanooga News, Sunday School magazines, and a popular pulp magazine of the day. He later wrote a column for The Campfire magazine, and spun such a wide interest, readers and writers alike responded to Stribling’s pieces.

Stribling discovered the dark side of his talent and began to write novels, beginning with Cruise of the Dry Dock in 1917, and Birthright in 1922, which was eventually made into a feature film. The novel is about a racially-mixed man suffering prejudice while living in a Southern town. Later, in 1922, he published East is East. The novel Fombombo was released in 1923, followed by Red Sand the following year. His readers wanted more. Teeftalow was published in 1926, became a bestseller, and was adapted as the Broadway play, Rope.

Stribling’s odd adventure stories led to his mysteries being collected in Clues of the Carribees in 1929. Within the span of a few years, Moore commented that “Stribling had penned a new series of ‘Poggioli stories’ for Adventure, Blue Book, and Red Book and other magazines of the early 1930s,” leading to his popularity with readers and setting the stage for his trilogy and another novel, Backwater, in 1930.

Stribling married music instructor Louella Kloss while he was garnering favor with his critics on social issues in the South. He finished The Forge in 1930, the first novel of the trilogy. The Store was published in 1932, and Unfinished Cathedral hit the shelves in 1934. The trilogy was considered by some as unthinkable stories of the South during a time period in which slavery and cotton were as common as trading mules for land.

The Store received rave reviews across the United States, but some readers in the South were not as happy about its release. The novel, exploring social and political injustices in the town of Florence, caused major tensions and led some townspeople to consider legal action. Stribling was saddened, and offered his apologies. He did not return to the state of Alabama for over thirty years. He later accepted speaking engagements at the University of North Alabama, where he discussed the nature of his novels. According to the Alabama Encyclopedia, his novels became required reading for UNA freshman English classes.

After the successful trilogy, Stribling penned two more novels, Sound Wagon in 1935, and These Bars of Flesh in 1938. From 1945 through the better part of 1950 Stribling again wrote another series of “Poggioli stores” for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, which found their way into the Robert Lowdndes-edited pulp, Famous Detective and Smashing Detective; the final stories were published in the Saint Detective magazine. The Kenneth Vickers biography of Stribling—Laughing Stock—states that the author’s work for pulp magazines made him feel like a “real grubstreet writer, a literary hack, a Chatterton, a Villon, an Attic Philosopher in Paris” and that writing pulp stories gave Stribling a “peculiar pleasure.”

The novelist served on the faculty of the English Department at Columbia University, and traveled extensively. He was the best-selling author of his time, and his trilogy alone sold more than 240,000 copies. Stribling died at the age of 84 in Florence, on July 8, 1965, and was buried in Clifton beside his longtime sweetheart Louella. His odd sense of story is still read today and he continues to entertain and enrapture the hearts of many.

Death was very much a part of life for Sullivan during his childhood years. His father, Walter, died when he was only three months old, leaving Sullivan to spend his infancy in a grieving family with his mother and her parents. Every Sunday afternoon his paternal grandparents visited, and they all went to the cemetery to pay respect to his father. Sullivan recalls that his “First encounter with literacy was learning to identify letters on bill boards.” He spent many of his childhood Saturday nights at Nashville’s Elite Theater, watching silent films, where they became an “inspiration” for Sullivan to learn to read because nobody read the subtitles to his satisfaction. “They didn’t read them quickly enough, and their renditions lacked passion,” recalls Sullivan in his memoir, Nothing Gold Can Stay.

Sullivan entered Vanderbilt University in September of 1941, two months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Sullivan revealed in his memoir, “Even for seventeen, I was immature and shy and deeply insecure, and I felt that I had been precipitated into an alien world where people [were] neither friendly nor hostile, but indifferent to my very existence.” At the end of his sophomore year, Sullivan became a Marine in the V-12 program, where he later became a first lieutenant.

Sullivan was able to graduate from Vanderbilt University in 1947 with his B.A. and earned his MFA at the University of Iowa two years later. After graduating, Sullivan became a Professor of fiction writing and literature at Vanderbilt University. His debut novel, Sojourn of a Stranger, was published in 1957 and was the book that hailed Sullivan “a writer of obvious talent” (New York Herald Tribune). His other novels are The Long, Long Love, set in the 1950’s in Middle Tennessee, and A Time to Dance, which takes place in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the author of numerous short stories and several books of literary criticism.

An advocate of preserving Southern literature, Sullivan was the founding member and Chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern writers and was Vanderbilt’s leading authority on the Fugitives and Agrarians. In 1973 Sullivan delivered a series of lectures on modern American novelists on WDCN, the NET channel in Nashville. The series became an immediate hit and subjects included Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Ann Porter, Eudora Welty, and Saul Bellow (Vanderbilt.edu). After 51 years of teaching at Vanderbilt University, Sullivan retired in 2000 having earned numerous awards.

In an interview with Contemporary Authors, Sullivan said, “Writing was not something I consciously chose to do. I was called to it, driven to it, obliged to do it–to do it as best I could and perhaps write something that people who were able to recognize good writing would consider good.” He also shared his process of writing recalling, “When I was young, I wrote at night. Now, I write in the morning, for about two hours, and then I’m through. But like most writers, the process goes on after you’ve left your computer. You continue to think about the work at hand.” Sullivan ended his interview by saying, “I brood a lot, which may be, for me, the most essential step in the act of writing.”

Sullivan won several awards, including: Literary Achievement Award, Southern Heritage Award, O’Henry Award, and Robert Heilman Prize for his literary works. After succumbing to cancer, The Walter Sullivan Prize was established to honor an author whose work demonstrates a marked accomplishment in fiction or the criticism of fiction. A collection of essays (Place in American Fiction) was conceived as a way to honor the life and career of Sullivan, for whom place was central in both his fiction and critical writing.

Sullivan developed a close personal relationship with many of his students who consider their lives enriched by this friendship. One of his former students said, “We mourn the passing of Walter Sullivan, we shall not see his like in the younger generation of ‘humanities’ professors, for people with his views are no longer hirable.” Another student recalled, “One of my favorite memories of his short-essay class is when one student wrote a story with a particularly awkward ending. Professor Sullivan said it wasn’t remotely believable, to which the student responded, ‘But that actually happened’. Sullivan told him, ‘That doesn’t make it believable’” (Nashville Scene).