The first Georgian to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction was a woman who never went to college. Caroline Miller was born in Waycross and published her first novel, Lamb in His Bosom, in 1933. It won the Pulitzer the next year. While Miller worked every day as a housewife and raised three children, she […]

A childhood tragedy would haunt poet and author Conrad Aiken all of his life, and provide the psychological foundation for much of his writing. Perhaps Georgia’s most famous poet, Aiken was born in Savannah. When he was only eleven years old, his father killed his mother and then committed suicide. Later, Aiken attended Harvard and […]

She was born in Eatonton in 1944 and at age 8 she was blinded in one eye by a BB gun fired by her brother, a traumatic event that crippled her self-confidence. She was eventually homecoming queen and valedictorian at Butler-Baker High School. But it was Alice Walker’s searing literary portraits of African-American life and […]

His was a voice of moderation during one of the South’s most racially divisive periods. Ralph McGill was born in Tennessee in 1898. His sports columns in the Nashville Banner caught the eye of Atlanta Constitution editor Clark Howell, who hired McGill in 1929. By 1941, McGill was the paper’s editor, and over the next […]

It is still one of the most popular films ever made, and its romanticized view of the Old South became firmly established in the popular imagination. Gone with the Wind was based on Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and the film’s completion was miraculous in itself. It took 140 days, 5 directors, and 13 writers—including […]

The Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable and the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta was supposed to be 100 percent fireproof, so there was no need for fire alarms, sprinklers, and fire escapes. At least that’s how it was advertised when the hotel at 176 Peachtree street opened in 1913. But on this day in 1946, […]

She just wanted to be known as Mrs. John Marsh. Margaret Mitchell was her maiden name. Born in Atlanta in 1900, she lived away from the city only once, for a year, at Smith College. Her grandfather fought in the Civil War; her mother’s family was Irish Catholic, like the O’Hara’s of Tara. Mitchell went […]

In the early morning hours of this day in 1958, 50 sticks of dynamite exploded at the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation, Atlanta’s oldest and most prominent synagogue. Though no one was injured, the city’s Jewish population feared the rise of antisemitism reminiscent of the Leo Frank lynching. The temple was the fourth southern synagogue to be […]

His writing still evokes the spirit of the north Georgia mountains. Novelist and poet Byron Herbert Reece was born in Union County near Blood Mountain. Nicknamed “Hub,” he grew up on the family farm. That life and his mountain heritage would be recurring themes in his writing. He attended Young Harris College and published his […]

The man who helped Henry Grady promote Atlanta as the heart of the “New South” was born in South Carolina. Georgia newspaper editor Clark Howell was the son of a former Confederate artillery captain. His father bought a half–interest in the Atlanta Constitution in 1876 and hired Henry Grady and Joel Chandler Harris to work […]