Title: A devil and a good woman, too
First published: 1997
Description: Julia Peterkin revolutionized 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 as 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 woman struggling to create something new out of the beauty and sorrow around her.

The first full account of Peterkin's life, A Devil and a Good Woman, Too is an exemplary biography of a brilliant, enigmatic woman who defied convention, lived as she pleased, and wrote what she knew.
Subjects: American Authors, Authors, American, Biography, Women and literature, Authors, biography, South carolina, biography, Women authors, American Women authors
Places: South Carolina
People: Julia Mood Peterkin (1880-1961)
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PS3531.E77 Z97 1997