December 8, 1998

Acclaimed novelist Ellen Douglas visits Loyola

On November 9, Loyola welcomed acclaimed author Ellen Douglas as part of the Women’s Studies Program and the Biever Guest Lecture Series. Douglas read from her latest work, which is her first nonfiction work, Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell. A reception and book-signing followed the reading.

Douglas is considered one of the most important contemporary Southern novelists. Truth recounts memories of Douglas’ life in Mississippi and her relationship with black Mississippians and other people and incidents that have stewed in her consciousness over the years. Douglas contends that her book is about “remembering and forgetting, seeing and ignoring, lying and truthtelling...It’s about truth in fiction and the fiction in truth.” The first edition of the book has sold out and the book is currently in its second printing with Algonquin Press.

Douglas was raised in small towns in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. After graduating from the University of Mississippi in 1942, she served as a writer-in-residence at Northeast Louisiana University for four years and at the University of Mississippi for eight years. Douglas’ (a.k.a. Josephine Haxton) other novels are: A Family’s Affairs (1961), Where the Dreams Cross (1968), Apostles of Light (1973), The Rock Cried Out (1979), A Lifetime Burning (1982), and Can’t Quit You, Baby (1988). She also has published a collection of two novellas and two stories, Black Cloud, White Cloud (1963) and The Magic Carpet, a collection of fairy tales.

Douglas was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1973 and received the Literature Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters in 1979 and 1982. In 1989, her work was honored with the Hillsdale Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.