SALON

Thursday, Nov 8, 2012 3:45 AM UTC

Mississippi author Ellen Douglas dies at 91

By

Topics: From the Wires,

Mississippi author Ellen Douglas dies at 91In this June 5, 2008 photograph Mississippi author and Jackson resident Josephine Haxton, who writes under the pen name Ellen Douglas, died Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2012 at her home in Jackson, Miss. She was 91. Douglas' stories, novels and nonfiction were set in Mississippi and dealt candidly with race relations, families and the role of women. (AP Photo/The Clarion-Ledger, Vickie D. King) NO SALES(Credit: AP)

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Ellen Douglas, a Mississippi native whose novel “Apostles of Light” was a 1973 National Book Award nominee, died Wednesday in Jackson. She was 91.

Douglas, who cited fellow Mississippi native William Faulkner as a literary influence, was the pen name of Josephine Ayres Haxton; she said she took a pseudonym to guard the privacy of her family. Douglas’ Mississippi-set work dealt candidly with race relations, families and the role of women.

Douglas grew up in Hope, Ark., and Alexandria, La., and spent summers with her grandparents in Natchez, Miss., where the family’s roots reached back generations. She graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1942. She wrote 11 books, including six novels and several collections of short stories and essays.

“Apostles of Light” is a complex novel about the mistreatment of residents at a home for the elderly in fictional Homochitto, Miss., the town in many of her works.

“If you don’t have conflict, you don’t have fiction,” Douglas told The Associated Press in a 2005 interview about race relations and other forces that helped shape literature.

State Rep. Steve Holland, a funeral director handling arrangements, said Douglas died after an extended illness. He said she would be buried in her native Natchez.

Douglas raised her family in Greenville, Miss., and had lived in Jackson for the past three decades.

In a 1980 oral history with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Douglas said she was influence by the “overwhelming hypnotic style” of Faulkner, who was living and writing in Oxford when she was a student there at the University of Mississippi. She said she met him once when she was a student and a couple of times years later, but didn’t know him well.

Her 1979 novel, “The Rock Cried Out,” is about a young Mississippi man whose cousin was killed during the Freedom Summer of 1964, a pivotal time for the civil rights movement in the Deep South state.

Some of her other works were “A Family’s Affairs” and “Can’t Quit You, Baby.”

Douglas won a lifetime achievement award in 2008 from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.

She is survived by three sons: Richard Haxton, Brooks Haxton and Ayres Haxton.

Cynthia Shearer, a novelist who is a writing consultant at Texas Christian University, said when she did her first public reading of her own writing in the 1980s, Douglas was in the audience in Oxford, Miss.

“She didn’t know me from Adam, but she beamed at me the whole time, telegraphing bravery to me,” Shearer recalled.

Shearer, author of the novels “The Wonder Book of the Air” and “The Celestial Jukebox,” said Douglas was quiet and unassuming.

“I saw her sitting by herself at a writer’s conference one time after I’d published my first novel, and I took my little glass of white wine over to sit with her,” Shearer told AP. “She held up her glass of bourbon instructionally, and then eyed my white wine sardonically, and said, ‘You got to do better than that.’”

Douglas was writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi from 1979 to 1983. One of her creative writing students was Larry Brown, an Oxford firefighter who later wrote “Big Bad Love” and other gritty novels set in the South. Brown died in 2004.

More Emily Wagster Pettus.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
FBI reportedly joins Bachmann campaign finance probe
239 points240 points | 15 comments
vote
Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills. "In an economy where we’re all in the same boat, one person’s spending is another person’s income. So when the government cuts spending, it reduces people’s income, leading to less business, more unemployment, and a vicious spiral of slowing down the economy."
243 points244 points | 212 comments
vote
Jon Karl makes things worse: He regrets “inaccurate” Benghazi email but says his story based on it “still entirely stands.” Really. ABC News?
207 points208 points | 31 comments
vote
“Jodorowsky’s Dune”: The sci-fi classic that never was.
81 points82 points | 16 comments
vote
Austerity Kills: Brian McArdle, a 57-year-old man who had had two strokes and could barely walk, was found "fit for work" by a government subcontractor, and had his benefits stopped. He died the next day.
66 points67 points | 4 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations