Shirley Anne Grau Biography
(1929– ), The Black Prince, The Hard Blue Sky, The House in Coliseum Street
American novelist, born in New Orleans, Louisiana, educated at Tulane University. Her first published work was a collection of stories, The Black Prince (1955); this, and the novels that followed—The Hard Blue Sky (1958) and The House in Coliseum Street (1961)—were well received by critics, who saw her as an exponent of the Southern school of writing. Keepers of the House (1964), a chronicle of three generations of the Howland family, was compared to the work of Faulkner, and won the Pulitzer Prize. Other works include the novels The Condor Passes (1971) and Evidence of Love (1977), and two collections of stories, The Wind Shifting West (1973) and Nine Women (1985); in the latter, she extends her range to include, for example, the perspective of women of the new black middle class.
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Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern FictionEncyclopedia of Literature: Francis Edward Grainger Biography to Thomas Anstey Guthrie Biography