Background
Caroline Pafford Miller was born on August 26, 1903, in Waycross, Georgia, United States. She was a daughter of Elias and Levy Zan Pafford.
Caroline attended Waycross High School which was a high school in the city of Waycross, Georgia, United States. In 1993, the Waycross School Board dissolved its charter and was absorbed by the Ware County School System.
(Lamb in His Bosom depicts the struggle and hardships of p...)
Lamb in His Bosom depicts the struggle and hardships of poor white pioneers in the nineteenth century on the south Georgia frontier, known as the wiregrass region. With characters named after Miller's own family members, Lamb in His Bosom grew out of her interest in local research and genealogy.
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1933
Caroline Pafford Miller was born on August 26, 1903, in Waycross, Georgia, United States. She was a daughter of Elias and Levy Zan Pafford.
Caroline attended Waycross High School. She demonstrated an early interest in writing and acting and performed in several high school plays. She never attended college, as shortly after graduation from the high school she married.
After her marriage to her high school English teacher, William D. Miller, the couple moved to Baxley. In addition to her domestic duties, Miller wrote short stories to supplement the family income.
Her first novel, Lamb in His Bosom, depicts the struggle and hardships of poor white pioneers in the nineteenth century on the south Georgia frontier, known as the wiregrass region. While traveling around the south Georgia countryside, she collected in a notebook the folktales and idiomatic expressions that became the basis for her simple and direct style of writing. The author, who had no formal training, received high praise from literary critics for her faithful representation of wiregrass dialect and culture.
In 1937 Caroline Miller, together with her second husband, made her home in Waynesville, North Carolina. There Miller continued to write features and short stories for newspapers and magazines. Her second novel, Lebanon (1944), received a lukewarm reception from critics, and Miller herself was not satisfied with it. Trying to recreate the success of her first book, Miller once again placed her heroine, Lebanon Fairgale, in the backwoods of Georgia. For this novel, however, Miller formulated an awkward romantic plot, garnering criticism that Lebanon lacked the realistic credibility of Lamb in His Bosom.
During the following decades Miller wrote prolifically and completed several manuscripts. Uncomfortable in the glare of the public spotlight so many years earlier, Miller chose not to publish any additional work. She remained in her mountain home in western North Carolina, cherishing her privacy and solitude. Lamb in His Bosom enjoyed a resurgence of popularity a year after Miller's death, when Peachtree Publishers in Atlanta reprinted the novel with an afterword by historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. This signaled a new attention to her work by both literary scholars and historians. Caroline Miller died on July 12, 1992, knowing that she had received what she once declared to be the true reward of a novelist—"the knowledge that after he dies he will leave the best part of himself behind."
(Lamb in His Bosom depicts the struggle and hardships of p...)
1933Caroline writing style was historical realism, and she wrote during the Southern literature renaissance of the inter-war years. Her fiction was based primarily on family history, and she depicted these narrative-based stories in a realistic, rather than romantic fashion. She is often compared to Southern regionalist writer Elizabeth Madox Roberts.
Quotes from others about the person
"Miller was a genuine talent, a skilled writer who tackled a very difficult theme and wove a successful and real pattern of men and women living out their days in the backwoods of Georgia.”
“Miller seeks to recapture the often monotonous rhythms of household activities; the stoic, almost fatalistic endurance of her pioneer ancestors; and the poetic beauty of backcountry Georgia.” - David M. Craig
Caroline was married to William D. Miller, an English teacher. In 1927, after six years of marriage, a son, William Dews Jr., was born. Miller gave birth again in 1929 to twin boys, George and Harvey. Caroline and William divorced in 1936. In 1937, she married Clyde Ray. Caroline gave birth to a fourth son, Clyde H. III, and a daughter, Caroline Patience.