Mary Ward Brown


Mary Ward Brown was an American short story writer and memoirist. Her work features Alabama as a setting and received several awards.

Early life

Brown was born on June 18, 1917 in Hamburg, Alabama. She graduated from Judson College.

Career

Her first collection of short stories, Tongues of Flame, published in 1986, won the PEN/Hemingway, the Alabama Author Award, the Lillian Smith Book Award, and the Hillsdale Fiction Prize. Following her second collection of short stories, It Wasn't All Dancing, published in 2002, Brown was awarded the Alabama Library Author Award, the Hillsdale Award for Fiction, and the Harper Lee Award. Paul Theroux has said of her writing that it was "...direct, unaffected, unsentimental,and powerful for its simplicity and for its revealing the inner life of rural Alabama...". Her story "Cure" was included in The Best American Short Stories 1984. Southern journalist John S. Sledge called Brown "our genius, our Chekov".

Books

Brown died on May 14, 2013.