Shirley Ann Grau

• Born: July 8, 1929
• Birthplace: New Orleans, Louisiana
• Died: August 3, 2020
• Place of death: Kenner, Louisiana

American novelist and short-story writer

Biography

Shirley Ann Grau was an important southern writer whose novels and short fiction, which are praised for their craftsmanship and economy, reflect the southern preoccupation with the effect of history on individual lives. She was the daughter of Adolphe Eugene Grau, a well-to-do dentist, and Katherine Onions Grau, a homemaker. Her father’s family, of Prussian background, settled in New Orleans after the Civil War, while on her mother’s side, Grau had an English, Celtic, and Delaware background.

Grau was educated at a small private school, Margaret Booth Academy, in Montgomery, Alabama. There she developed a lifelong interest in Latin and Greek. As a senior, she transferred to the Ursuline Academy in New Orleans and then went on to Sophie Newcomb College, the women’s college of Tulane University, where she earned a Phi Beta Kappa key and received a BA with honors in English in 1950. She embarked on graduate studies there but left without finishing her degree and instead began selling stories.

In 1955 Grau married a philosophy professor at Tulane University, James Kern Feibleman. They would have four children.

When Grau’s first collection of short stories, The Black Prince, and Other Stories (1955), was published, it was well received. Set in southern Louisiana, the stories deal with both White and Black characters whose will to survive and to triumph was too frequently thwarted by death (the product of violence in the environment or simply blind fate). Notably, she wrote at times from the perspective of Black people, unlike contemporary White writers such as Flannery O'Connor. The Black Prince became a finalist for the 1956 National Book Award for Fiction.

Grau’s first novel, The Hard Blue Sky (1958), was highly praised for its realistic description of the lives of inbred fishermen on an island at the mouth of the Mississippi. It was her complex and dramatic fourth book, The Keepers of the House (1964), however, which won for her critical acclaim, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; it also drew the ire of Ku Klux Klan members, who attempted to threaten Grau and her family. Set in the Mississippi Delta rather than in the bayous, this novel traces the relationships between Whites and Black characters through three generations of a plantation family.

Although the reception of Grau’s later novels was mixed, her short stories were so much praised that some critics suggested she was most effective in this genre. In The Condor Passes (1971), Grau examines the lives of a number of characters in separate episodes, attempting to achieve unity primarily through symbolism. It is significant that many reviewers accused this novel of a lack of unity. On the other hand, when she wrote her undeniably fascinating sketches in short-story form, as in the 1985 collection Nine Women, she seemed to be highly successful.

The assumption that Grau was merely another New Orleans writer in the local-color or southern gothic tradition was challenged by literary scholarship. Although the sense of place, the awareness of the natural environment, and the presence of the past are stressed in all of her works, as they are generally in southern literature, and although there is frequently violence and sometimes the supernatural, these themes and elements are always subordinate to her concern with the human predicament in the modern world. The Black characters in the story “The Black Prince” reveal the universal fascination of human beings with the unknown and their susceptibility to sheer terror when they are confronted with the supernatural. Similarly, although The Hard Blue Sky is praised for its evocations of nature during the hot, tense hours of a coming hurricane, the characters in the novel have the same adolescent uncertainties, agonies of love, and capacities for heroism as people in any other setting.

At first glance The Keepers of the House might be considered another southern novel about the ill-fated liaisons between White plantation owners and their Black slaves or servants. The protagonist of the novel, Abigail Tolliver, is married to a politician whose future depends on his segregationist stance. As in almost every southern novel, the past surfaces to haunt or taint the present. In The Keepers of the House, it is the discovery that Abigail’s grandfather had actually married his Black housekeeper that destroys Abigail’s marriage and leaves her alone to face a shocked and hostile community. Grau shows, however, that it is Abigail’s reaction to her situation that is of importance in determining not only her own future and that of her community but also the future of the South and of the modern world. Like Annie Landry of The Hard Blue Sky, Joan Mitchell of The House on Coliseum Street, and Anna and Margaret Oliver of The Condor Passes, Abigail cannot rise above the past to fulfill the future’s promise. She is motivated by family honor to carry out a plan of revenge both on her racist community and on her grandfather’s Black offspring. Similarly, Grau focuses on a point of crisis for each woman in her short-story collection Nine Women and on the response of each protagonist to the breakup of a marriage or the death of a husband.

Two later novels suggest more hope for humanity’s future. In Evidence of Love (1977), Lucy Roundtree Evans Henley (from British East Africa) eludes the grasp of family and the weight of the past to fashion a house open to possibility. In Roadwalkers (1994), the Black protagonists Baby (Mary) Woods and her daughter Nanda use their strength and independence to become successful in White southern culture. Baby, a roadwalker during the Depression, runs away from a Catholic orphanage and her future as a house servant for a White man, to open her own dress shops, raise Nanda single-handedly, and support her daughter through a Catholic private school and Phi Beta Kappa graduation from college. Mother and daughter maintain their spiritual ties with nature and their autonomy from the South’s diseased racial past (unlike Stanley of The Condor Passes).

Grau’s later works continued to fulfill her early promise. Her work was recognized as superbly crafted and profoundly significant. Although her materials are those of a William Faulkner, her way of handling them is far more like Ernest Hemingway. Like him, in the fewest possible words she always suggests a world of human experience.

In addition to her fiction writing, Grau briefly served as a creative writing instructor at the University of New Orleans in the 1960s. She also tried her hand at screenwriting, with the 1992 television movie Maddie's Waltz.

Grau lived in Metairie, Louisiana, and summered on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. She was selected for the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame in 2018. Two years later, at age ninety-one, she experienced a stroke and died of complications on August 3, 2020, in Kenner, Louisiana.

Author Works

Long Fiction

The Hard Blue Sky, 1958

The House on Coliseum Street, 1961

The Keepers of the House, 1964

The Condor Passes, 1971

Evidence of Love, 1977

Roadwalkers, 1994

Short Fiction

The Black Prince, and Other Stories, 1955

The Wind Shifting West, 1973

Nine Women, 1985

Selected Stories, 2003

Bibliography

George, Courtney. “Shirley Ann Grau.” Encyclopedia of Alabama, 28 Nov. 2018, encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-2481. Accessed 2 Nov. 2020.‌

Grau, Shirley Ann. Interview by William Griffin. Publishers Weekly 229 (January 10, 1986): 70–71. A brief biographical sketch and conversation, in which Grau talks about her life and her work, including her short-story collection Nine Women.

Kissel, Susan S. Moving On: The Heroines of Shirley Ann Grau, Anne Tyler, and Gail Godwin. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996. Examines the fictional characters of three contemporary female writers. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Oleksy, Elzbieta. “The Keepers of the House: Scarlett O’Hara and Abigail Howland.” In Louisiana Women Writers: New Essays and a Comprehensive Bibliography, edited by Dorothy H. Brown and Barbara C. Ewell. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Centering on their heroines, Oleksy nonetheless makes a rather complete comparison of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) and The Keepers of the House.

O’Neal, Susan Hines. “Cultural Catholicism in Shirley Ann Grau’s The Hard Blue Sky.” Louisiana Folklore Miscellany 10 (1995): 24–36. O’Neal sees the islanders’ attitude in the novel not as an example of their indifference to the mutability of life but rather as a ritual acceptance stemming from their Catholicism and its melding with folk philosophy and worldly truths.

Pearson, Ann. “Shirley Ann Grau: ‘Nature Is the Vision.’” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 17 (1975): 47-58. This article deals with Grau’s use of nature, which seems to permeate her novels and stories. Pearson suggests that Grau’s vision of the world lies in her perception of the ever-present closeness of nature.

Rohrberger, Mary. “Shirley Ann Grau and the Short Story.” In Women Writers of the Contemporary South, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. Rohrberger argues that Grau’s short stories are models of the form, making use of a surface content and substructures pointing to analogues that carry meaning.

Schlueter, Paul. Shirley Ann Grau. Boston: Twayne, 1981. The first book-length critical study of Grau’s work. Excellent use of details, though somewhat short on interpretation.

Shigley, Sally Bishop. “Refuge or Prison: Images of Enclosure and Freedom in Shirley Ann Grau’s Nine Women.” Short Story, n.s. 3 (Fall, 1995): 54-68. Discusses the unifying thematic symbols and images that tie the stories together in Grau’s short-story cycle. Argues that the stories express a need for shelter from the sometimes too real aspects of the world and the danger in finding such security.

Smith, Harrison. “Shirley Ann Grau, a ‘Quiet Force’ in Southern Literature, Dies at 91.” The Washington Post, 4 Aug. 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/shirley-ann-grau-a-quiet-force-in-southern-literature-dies-at-91/2020/08/04/3edb8dbc-d65b-11ea-930e-d88518c57dcc‗story.html. Accessed 2 Nov. 2020.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Shirley Ann Grau’s Wise Fiction.” In Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonette Bond Inge. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. Argues that Grau’s highly stylized manner of narration is in many ways in the style of the folktale. Contends that one of her most distinctive traits is her interest in ceremony and ritual. Makes general comments about Grau’s fiction that apply to her stories; for example, that her best fiction deals with the nonwhite culture’s impingement on the patriarchal matrix that dominates southern life.