Joan Williams (author)

For other uses, see Joan Williams.

Joan Williams (September 26, 1928 – April 11, 2004) was an American author.

Early life

Williams was born on September 26, 1928, in Memphis, Tennessee. She attended Southwestern University and Chevy Chase Junior College, graduating from Bard College in 1950. She later met William Faulkner, having a five-year relationship with him.

Writing career

Williams published her first stories while a student at Bard College. "Rain Later" received the College Fiction Prize from Mademoiselle, and four years later, she published a sequel in the same venue. These two stories together formed the nucleus of her first novel, "The Morning and the Evening", whose publication led novelist William Styron to call Williams a "greatly gifted writer".

Personal life

Williams and Faulkner's relationship was both personal and professional, but Williams never found the personal part of it satisfying: correspondence between the two writers shows Faulkner's ongoing frustration with Williams' ambivalence. In 1954, she married sportswriter and editor Ezra Bowen, whose mother was biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen. Williams and Bowen had two sons and three grand-daughters. From 1984 to 1994, she lived with Atlantic editor Seymour Lawrence, who had accepted a story of hers in 1952. She died on April 11, 2004, in Atlanta.

Works

Novels

• The Morning and the Evening (New York: Atheneum, 1961)
• Old Powder Man (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966)
• The Wintering (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1971)
• Country Woman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982)
• Pay the Piper (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1988)

Short stories

• "Rain Later," in Mademoiselle
• "The Morning and the Evening," in Atlantic Monthly (1952)
• Pariah and Other Stories (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983)

Non-fiction

• "Twenty Will not Come Again," in Atlantic Monthly 245.5 (May 1980)
• "Sanctuary of the Storyteller: A New Orleans Couple Has Restored the House Where William Faulkner Became a Writer," in Southern Accents 15.3 (April, 1992)

Awards

• Mademoiselle College Fiction Prize, 1949
• Best American Short Stories 1949 (honorable mention for "Rain Later")
• National Book Award for Fiction finalist, 1961
• John P. Marquand First Novel Award, 1961
• National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, 1962
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1988

Archives

Joan Williams's papers reside at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.