Scarlet Sister Mary (The Franklin Library Pulitzer Prize Series)
(Julia Peterkin pioneered in demonstrating the literary po...)
Julia Peterkin pioneered in demonstrating the literary potential for serious depictions of the African American experience. Rejecting the prevailing sentimental stereotypes of her times, she portrayed her black characters with sympathy and understanding, endowing them with the full dimensions of human consciousness. In these novels and stories, she tapped the richness of rural southern black culture and oral traditions to capture the conflicting realities in an African American community and to reveal a grace and courage worthy of black pride.
Julia Peterkin (Mood) was an American writer from South Carolina, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize.
Background
She was born on October 31, 1880 in Laurens County, South Carolina, United States, the daughter of Julius Andrew Mood and Alma Archer. Her mother died shortly after Julia's birth.
Reared by her father, a country physician, and by the black nurse, or "Mauma, " she was brought up within two cultures: that of the Southern white elite and that of the richly folkloric black community. Julius Mood, a cultivated man, was the key influence in her life. From her nurse she learned the dialect, customs, and superstitions of the Gullah blacks, a "perfect" stock with "tall straight bodies, and high heads filled with sense, " as she described them in a novel. Raised in a country where, as she saw it, "the earth's richness and the sun's warmth make living an easy thing, " Mood developed a strong consciousness of place, coupled with an independent nature.
Education
When she was fourteen, her father sent her and her sister to Columbia College in the state capital. But within a year the two rebellious girls were dismissed. Undaunted, their father immediately enrolled them in Converse College at nearby Spartanburg. In 1896, Mood received the bachelor's degree and then remained in college for another year to earn a master's degree.
Career
At seventeen, Mood became a teacher in a one-room school with fewer than ten pupils at Fort Motte, a farming settlement some twenty miles from Columbia that was dominated by the Peterkin family of Lang Syne Plantation. In 1903 she married William George Peterkin, heir to the plantation.
After her marriage she managed a family operation employing between 400 and 500 Gullah blacks. For the next seventeen years, Peterkin learned farming, traveled, and led an active social life as member of patriotic, genealogical, and cultural societies. She experimented with horticulture and aviculture and sought artistic outlet in fancy needlework.
Misfortune struck about 1920, when illness permanently incapacitated her husband, and Peterkin was forced to take complete charge of the estate. First a livestock epidemic, and then the death of the foreman, threatened to ruin the plantation. But, supported emotionally by her father and sustained by her resilience, she brought the plantation through this series of crises.
In 1921, partly as therapy and partly in response to the encouragement of her piano teacher, Dr. Henry Bellamann, Peterkin began to write sketches of plantation life. Through Bellamann she was introduced to Carl Sandburg, who suggested that Peterkin submit these sketches to H. L. Mencken. This chance introduction into the literary world resulted in the publication of one sketch in Mencken's magazine, Smart Set, and fourteen sketches in Emily Clark's literary magazine, the Reviewer.
Peterkin's first book, Green Thursday (1924), was a collection of sketches and short stories. Her first novel, a tragedy entitled Black April (1927), won wide acclaim and made Peterkin a leader in the southern literary renaissance. Peterkin continued with Bright Skin (1932) and Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933). But thereafter, until her husband died in 1939, she devoted herself to the increasingly difficult management of Lang Syne.
World War II, her failing health, and severe droughts in the early 1950's troubled her last years. She died at Orangeburg, South Carolina.
Achievements
Julia Peterkin was one of the few white authors who wrote about the African-American experience. She was compared with such writers as William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter. Her reputation was established when she wrote her best novel, the comedy Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), won a Pulitzer Prize, thus, more than 1 million copies of Scarlet Sister Mary were sold, in English and in translation.
Peterkin experimented with a narrative structure that yields to succeeding episodes in what she perceived as a purposive human drama, the "patient struggle with fate. " Carried along by Peterkin's strong feelings, the novels lack a clear ordering principle. Perhaps this deficiency, in the end, curtailed her career and has separated her works from those of such contemporaries as William Faulkner and Willa Cather.
Personality
She was a tall, attractive woman, energetic as well as creative.
Connections
In 1903 she married William George Peterkin, heir to the plantation. They had a son.
