000			01869cam a2200253 a 4500
001			054259
005			20231009193026.0
008			091606s1997 gaua b s001 0beng
010			_a97013189
020			_a9780820319124
050	0	0	_aPS3531.E77 _bZ97 1997
082	0	0	_a92 PET
100	1		_aWilliams, Susan Millar
245	1	2	_aA devil and a good woman, too _b: the lives of Julia Peterkin _c/ Susan Millar Williams
260			_aAthens _b: University of Georgia Press _c, c1997.
300			_axx, 343 p. _b: ill. _c; 25 cm.
504			_aIncludes bibliographical references (p. [307]-327) and index.
520			_aJulia Peterkin revoluntionized American literature by writing seriously about the lives of plain black farming people. In five bold, lyrical books she pushed the bounds of realism to earn the startled praise of such intellectuals and literary artists a W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. A plantation mistress who vowed to "write what is, even if it is unpleasant," she took up writing at age forty, produced two best-selling novels, and won a Pulitzer Prize before mysteriously abandoning writing twelve years later. Peterkin's fiction chronicles the collapse of plantation agriculture on the Gullah coast of South Carolina. At the same time her writings are a thinly veiled autobiography of a southern white womabn struggling to create something new out of the beauty and sorrow around her. Writing to her mentor H.L. Mencken in 1922, Peterkin declared, "These black friends of mine live more in one Saturday ngiht than I do in five years. I envy them, and I guess as I cannot be them, I seek satisfaction in trying to record them."
600	1	0	_aPeterkin, Julia Mood, 1880-1961
650		4	_aAuthors, American _y-20th century _v--Biography
650		0	_aWomen and literature
651		0	_aSouth Carolina _v--Biography
942			_cMO
999			_c256802 _d256802