Joan Williams
Joan Williams was a notable Southern writer born in 1928 in Memphis, Tennessee. She grew up in a family deeply rooted in Southern culture and frequently visited Mississippi, experiences that greatly influenced her literary work. Williams gained early recognition as a writer when her short story "Rain Later" won the Mademoiselle College Fiction Contest in 1949, leading to a formative friendship with renowned author William Faulkner. Throughout her career, she authored several novels, including her acclaimed debut, *The Morning and the Evening* (1961), which was a National Book Award finalist, and *Old Powder Man* (1966), a semiautobiographical reflection on her father.
Williams's writing often explores the complexities of Southern life and the human condition, earning her comparisons to literary greats like Faulkner and Eudora Welty. She continued to produce significant works, including *County Woman* (1982) and *Pay the Piper* (1988), the latter of which garnered a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her short story collection, *Pariah, and Other Stories* (1983), was noted for its thematic focus on endurance. Williams passed away on April 11, 2004, leaving a legacy that solidified her place in Southern literature.
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Joan Williams
Writer
- Born: September 26, 1928
- Birthplace: Memphis, Tennessee
- Died: April 11, 2004
Biography
Joan Williams was a quintessentially Southern writer with especially close links to William Faulkner. She was born in 1928 in Memphis, Tennessee, to Priestly Howard Williams, a dynamite and explosives dealer, and Maude Moore Williams, both Southerners who had settled in Memphis. Williams was an only child. During her childhood, she paid frequent visits to her relatives in Tate County, Mississippi, and the impressions gained there were to shape her later writing.
While at college, she submitted a short story to the Mademoiselle College Fiction Contest of 1949 entitled “Rain Later,” and her story won the contest. The story also received an honorable mention on the Best American Short Story of 1949 list. This success inclined her towards writing, and she paid an impromptu visit to Faulkner, then at the height of his fame, at his home in Rowan Oak, Mississippi, in 1949. From this visit a literary friendship developed between the two and they exchanged hundreds of letters, many on the nature of the writer and the writing process.
Another short story, “The Morning and the Evening,” was accepted in 1952 by Seymour Lawrence, a young editor at the The Atlantic Monthly. In 1954, Williams married Ezra Bowen, a journalist for Sports Illustrated, in Memphis, and soon after the couple moved to New York, where they later had two sons. In 1956, the couple moved to Stamford, Connecticut. However, Williams found no inspiration from the area and it was not until 1958 that she published a short story in Mademoiselle. That year she attended the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, where she conceived of using her short stories as a basis for a novel. The book appeared in 1961 under the title The Morning and the Evening. The novel was praised for its Southern landscape as well as its humor and insights into the human predicament. It became a finalist for the National Book Award and received the John P. Marquand Award for the most distinguished first novel of the year. Williams also received a grant for the novel from the Institute of Arts and Letters in 1962.
Her second novel, Old Powder Man (1966), is a semiautobiographical account of her larger-than-life father. The novel received many favorable reviews and was considered a Southern version of Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s famous play set in New England. Williams’s third novel, The Wintering (1971), is again semiautobiographical, based upon her friendship with Faulkner. Just before its publication she had divorced Bowen and soon after married her second husband, John Fargason of Clover Hill Plantation in Coahoma County, Mississippi. They divorced in 1981. In 1984, she once again met Lawrence, her former editor, and the two lived together in Mississippi until his death in 1994. Lawrence appears to have been the true love of Williams’s life.
Williams wrote two additional novels: County Woman (1982), which was praised for its faultless depiction of rural communities in the South, and Pay the Piper (1988). The latter novel won her a Guggenheim Fellowship. Pariah, and Other Stories, a collection of Williams’s short stories, was published in 1983. The critic and writer Anne Tyler noted the centrality of endurance in each of the stories, a characteristic of the short stories of Faulkner and of another Southern writer, Eudora Welty. Several of these stories have appeared in short- story anthologies, including “Vistas,” which is included in Homeworks: A Book of Tennessee Writers, published by the University of Tennessee Press in 1996. Technically, Williams is a Tennessee writer because she was born and raised in Memphis, even though most of her work is set in Mississippi.
Williams also wrote two novellas that were published in periodicals. Two of her novels were reissued by the Louisiana State University Press as part of its Voices of the South series: The Morning and the Evening was republished in 1994 and The Wintering was rereleased in 1997. Williams died on April 11, 2004, at the age of seventy-five.