Most Popular Books by Ellen Douglas

“It is rare when a book this fine enters the world of contemporary American literature.” – The Boston Globe Two women share a Mississippi household for fifteen years, rolling out piecrusts and making conversation. Cornelia is rich, white, and pampered, the mistress of the house, who oversees a seemingly perfect world of smooth surfaces and stubborn silence. Tweet, her housekeeper, is a poor, black, world-weary woman with a ghost-ridden past. As the years go by, Cornelia and Tweet each endure moments of uncertainty and despair; each, in her time of need, is rescued by the other. In the footsteps of Southern writers like Peter Taylor, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor, Ellen Douglas celebrates the resiliency of the human spirit in this story of two women bound by transgression and guilt, memory and illusion, gratitude and love. “Ellen Douglas is not just one of our best Southern novelists. She is one of our best American novelists.” – The New York Times Book Review

So spontaneous is the writing in A Lifetime Burning, one might believe these are indeed words of a woman desperately trying to understand what has happened to her life, beginning with the fact that her husband has stopped sleeping with her. Why? Is there a rival—perhaps “The Toad,” the unattractive housewife next door—or someone else, who will completely surprise the reader, as do many of the events of the protagonist''s story? At age sixty-two, Corinne must grapple with the most painful truth that her lifelong passion—which is anyone''s passion, to love and be loved, body and soul—could burn unquenched forever. Her imaginative narrative even when she is lying is as revealing as bedrock truth. A Lifetime Burning is as real as life itself—a novel shimmering and vital and recognizably true. Gripping, smart, suspenseful, and at times, wonderfully witty, Douglas''s widely acclaimed book forms a searching and searing record of love, anger, confession, and discovery.

In four haunting family stories, Ellen Douglas seeks to track down the truth--about herself, about her white Mississippi forebears, about their relationships to black Mississippians, and ultimately about their guilt as murderers of helpless slaves. Progressively searching further and further back in time, each of these four family tales involves collusion and secrets. In "Grant," a randy old uncle dying in the author''s house is nursed by a beautiful black woman while his white family watches from a "respectful" distance. Who loves him better? When truth is death, who is braver facing it? In "Julia and Nellie," very close cousins make "a marriage in all but name" back in the days of easy scandal. The nature of the liaison never mentioned, the family waives its Presbyterian morality in the face of family deviance. In "Hampton," her grandmother''s servant, who has constructed a world closed to whites, evades the author''s tentative efforts at a meeting of minds. And finally, in "On Second Creek," Douglas confronts her obsession with the long-lost--or -buried--facts of the "examination and execution" of slaves who may or may not have plotted an uprising. Having published fiction for four decades, here she crosses over into the mirror world of historical fact. It''s a book, she says, "about remembering and forgetting, seeing and ignoring, lying and truth-telling." It''s about secrets, judgments, threats, danger, and willful amnesia. It''s about the truth in fiction and the fiction in "truth." Praise for Ellen Douglas: "It''s possible to think that some people were simply born to write. Ellen Douglas is just such a writer."--Richard Ford; "Proust wrote in one of his last letters, ''one must never be afraid of going too far, for the truth is beyond.'' Ellen Douglas has taken this very much to heart and has sought the truth in a region beyond falsehood; through falsehood, in effect. It''s a fascinating performance."--Shelby Foote.

This story of the modern South, of love denied and love fulfilled, is a powerful account of the potential for violence that underlies this country''s passionate history. Ellen Douglas, a native of Mississippi and a prize-winning novelist of rare distinction, reveals the turbulent changes that rocked the South in the sixties and continue to this day. No event is predictable in this powerful novel. A young man who has spent several years in the North returns to his native Mississippi seeking rural peace. But solitude is not to be his, for soon he is caught up again in a traumatic event that happened seven years before in 1964—the death in an auto accident of the beautiful young cousin whom he loved. As the story unfolds, the people who were involved in that senseless tragedy reveal their part in it, and as they do, the reader becomes intensely involved not only in their lives but in what it means to be Black or white in the modern South.

"So when I went down to ask my aunts if it would be all right to publish A Family''s Affairs, they said it was okay so long as they didn''t have to read it and if I would use a pen name." This collection of interviews from three decades features one of the South''s most prominent contemporary writers, one of America''s most dazzling practitioners of postmodern fiction. From the early sixties, when she published the award-winning A Family''s Affairs, to the late nineties and the publication of Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell, Ellen Douglas has written novels, short stories, essays, and a book of fairy tales. These conversations with Douglas reveal her earthy frankness and her disdain for "portentous declaration." In them, just as in her fiction, she expresses her love of people, language, and stories, her constant moral values, her inclusive compassion, her deeply felt obligations to others, and her keen sense of humor. She explains that "comedy is as serious as tragedy -- it''s just funnier." Because she is an excellent, candid conversationalist, her light touch with "portentous" matters makes these interviews both dead serious and very funny. The first is with Hodding Carter III, who in 1971 was a young journalist and family friend from Greenville, Mississippi, the town where Douglas was living and rearing three sons. Carter is among her early interviewers who explore the mystique of the southern writer and the southern climate for literature. Douglas''s string of new novels took her work forward into civil rights, women''s roles, and questions about the institutions of family and marriage. The conversations illuminate this shift from southern tradition to concern over contemporary issues. Arranged chronologically, the interviews testify to the growth of Douglas''s narrative sensibility and to the profound use of allusions in her work. As she discusses A Family''s Affairs; Black Cloud, White Cloud; Where the Dreams Cross; Apostles of Light; The Rock Cried Out; A Lifetime Burning; The Magic Carpet and Other Tales; Can''t Quit You, Baby; and Truth, her remarks exhibit a consistent concern with technique and craftsmanship, for which she is much admired. Of these sixteen interviews ten originally appeared in print between 1971 and 1999. Six have never before been published. Resurrecting lost material and exploring new insights, this collection offers the only comprehensive introduction to Douglas''s lasting body of powerful work. It also provides the tools for the in-depth studies of her art which are sure to follow. Panthea Reid is a professor of English at Louisiana State University.

This rich, leisurely tale chronicles the lives of three generations in the family of Kate Anderson, a young, genteel southern widow residing in the small Mississippi town of Homochitto. An intimate examination of the significance of family, this novel, Douglas'' first, is a statement of how people survive crises not only through their own courage but also through the support of those who cannot turn away from them. The layers of birth, childhood, courtship, marriage, illness, and death - seen through the gradually maturing eyes of Anna, Kate''s granddaughter - reveal the tapestry of shared experiences, joys, and sorrows that bond a family and build its history.

Nat Stonebridge is a thirtyish divorcee who, because of her sexy good looks and incorruptible disregard for convention, has stayed in trouble most of her life. Stranded at home in Philippi, a small town in the Mississippi Delta, after a divorce from her well-to-do husband, she is broke, bored, and unconcerned for anyone except herself. Looking for excitement, she becomes involved with Floyd Shotwell, the strange, solitary son of a rich and ruthless businessman. By turns ironic and funny and threatening as the raw land in which it takes place, the couple''s story moves toward a violent climax in which not only Nat''s physical safety, but the financial security of her family, are at stake. Douglas explores the theme of moral commitment as Nat is confronted with a decision, a sacrifice, which she knows will earn her only contempt. In turn, her friend, the gentle and reflective Wilburn Griffith, is forced to face the obsessive Shotwell with a weapon he abhors.

The elderly couple in this fine novel, a retired schoolteacher and the doctor with whom she has had a lifelong, tender love affair, find that, almost by accident, they have forfeited control of their own lives. Trapped in a nursing home, they are the victims of the biblical "apostles of light", the deceitful do-gooders who profess righteousness. In subtle, elegant prose Ellen Douglas recounts a gripping story of their brave attempt to free themselves from a dreadful plight. They must confront both their corrupt and evil custodians and their well-meaning younger relatives who are tempted by greed, ambition, cowardice, and indifference.