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…
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…
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…
James Still was born on July 16, 1906 at Double Branch in Chambers County, Alabama located in the foothills of the Appalachians. Still was the sixth of ten children, but was able to be named after his father because he was the first boy to be born into his family. From 1906 to 1924, he…
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…
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…
