Gail Godwin

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Gail Kathleen Godwin (born June 18, 1937 ^[1] ) is an American novelist and short story writer. She has published one non-fiction work, two collections of short stories, and eleven novels, three of which have been nominated for the National Book Award and five of which have made the New York Times Bestseller List.

Godwin was born in Birmingham, Alabama but raised in Asheville, North Carolina by her divorced mother and grandmother.^[2] She attended Peace College in Raleigh, North Carolina (a women's college founded by Presbyterians in 1857) from 1955 to 1957, but graduated with a B.A. in Journalism from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1959. She worked briefly as a reporter for the Miami Herald and married a Herald photographer named Douglas Kennedy. After the job and the marriage (by firing and by divorce, respectively) finished, she worked as waitress back home in North Carolina to save money to travel to Europe, where she worked as a travel consultant for the U.S. Embassy in London in the early 1960s. She returned to the United States and worked briefly as an editorial assistant at the Saturday Evening Post before attending the University of Iowa, earning her M.A. (1968) and PhD (1971) in English Literature there.

[edit] Bibliography

The Perfectionists (1970)
Glass People (1972)
The Odd Woman (1974) (National Book Award nominee)
Dream Children (1976) (collection)
Violet Clay (1978) (National Book Award nominee)
A Mother and Two Daughters (1982) (National Book Award nominee)
Mr. Bedford and the Muses (1983) (collection)
The Finishing School (1984)
A Southern Family (1987)
Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1991)
The Good Husband
Evensong (1999)
Heart (2001) (nonfiction)
Evenings at Five (2003)
Queen of the Underworld (2006)
The Making of a Writer (2006) (nonfiction, ed. Rob Neufeld)

[edit] References

^ Reference Guide to American Literature, Third Edition, ed. by D. K. Kirkpatrick, 1994
^ National Book Foundation website, accessed February 5, 2007 [1]