August 26

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 also researched and wrote her book. It was an immediate best seller and one of the most critically acclaimed first novels of the Southern Renaissance. Praised for the authenticity of dialect and lifestyle in the wiregrass region of Georgia it portrayed, Lamb in His Bosom is widely considered a precursor to Gone With the Wind.

But the instant fame strained Miller’s marriage, which ended in divorce in 1936. She remarried, and published her second novel, Lebanon, in 1944. She never published again, preferring to live and write in seclusion and privacy at her North Carolina home.

Caroline Miller wrote about strong women who overcame adversity, as she herself did in her life of 88 years that began on August 26, 1903, Today in Georgia History.