Today, Open Road celebrates the birth of one of America’s most masterful storytellers, Shirley Ann Grau. Grau was born on July 8, 1929, in New Orleans. A few years later, her family moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where her father was stationed with the army. She returned to New Orleans for her senior year of high school, then attended nearby Tulane University, earning a BA in English in 1950.
Her first published story appeared in 1953, in the university quarterly the New Mexico Review. Soon, another was printed in the New Yorker. Encouraged by these acceptances, Grau began a series of short stories set in her familiar world of the Deep South. That collection, The Black Prince, was published in 1955 and earned great critical attention. Grau kept an announcement of its initial publication (pictured at left). “No book is ever as exciting as the first,” she notes. “I found this in my flood-wrecked house in New Orleans, dried it out with a hair dryer.”
Her public profile rose during the civil rights movement, when her novel The Keepers of the House (1964), which deals with race relations in Alabama, earned her a Pulitzer Prize. Grau’s novels and stories often track a rapidly changing South against the complex backdrop of regional history.
Grau reflects, “I hope that when people read my books, they will see that people are endlessly interesting, and despite all the evil in the world, that people are still capable of some breathtaking goodness.”
To learn more about Grau and her ebooks, visit her author page here.