2014 Ella Dickey Literacy Award Winner for A Rare Titanic Family
From Betsi Yvette via Facebook:
"I finished reading A Rare Titanic Family. It’s an absolute treasure, so moving that I cried in the end.❤️ Thank you, Julie Hedgepeth Williams!"
Click the radio to hear the terrific podcast about the Caldwells on the Titanic:
All
New!
Little Newspapers on the Prairie: The Frontier Press Career
of Carrie Ingalls
Julie Hedgepeth Williams,
author and speaker
Click the cover of my new booklet, Little Newspapers on the Prairie, to find out about Carrie Ingalls' career in the press.
Three not-so-ordinary guys who were all named Joe...
They were three guys named Joe who lived across four different centuries and on two different continents. All were journalists. Two were famous; one desperately wished to be. Only two knew each other, but they idolized the other. One had never heard of the American South, which didn't even exist in his day, while the other two grouched mightily that Southerners wouldn't support their own writers. Despite all of that, these three not-so-ordinary Joes somehow combined to start Southern literature, which knocked New England off its perch as the queen of American belles-lettres.
Joseph Addison
Joseph Addison Turner
Joel Chandler Harris
Joseph Addison Turner longed mightily to be famous as the founder of Southern literature. He started a newspaper, The Countryman, on his own Turnwold plantation near Eatonton, Georgia, during the American Civil War. He carefully copied the style and writing instructions of his idol, Joseph Addison, for whom he had been named and whose writings he had studied extensively. Addison's newspaper, The Spectator, had been the most popular literature in England in its day.
Turner hired a printer's devil, a poverty-stricken, illegitimate local teenager, Joel Chandler Harris. Turner recognized right away that the boy had promise, so the plantation editor set out to teach Harris to write by following Addison's rules.
Although Turner had tried and failed, tried and failed, tried and failed to become famous as a writer, at last he had a hit in The Countryman. The little newspaper circulated all over the Confederacy and was widely quoted. But the Civil War didn't go the way Turner had imagined, and The Countryman folded shortly after the war ended. Turner died soon after that. As far as he knew, his dream of starting Southern literature had failed.
Harris left The Countryman to work in newspapers all around Georgia. Years after the war, he was assigned to write "the Negro column" at The Atlanta Constitution. Casting about for where to begin, Harris remembered his teen years as the typesetter on the plantation newspaper. In the evenings, he and the Turner children would go to the slave cabins to hear slaves tell fantastical animal stories, in which the wily Brer Rabbit always outsmarted Brer Fox. Harris named his slave storyteller "Uncle Remus."
To Harris's utter shock, the Uncle Remus stories became a worldwide hit. The wild popularity of Uncle Remus put Southern belles-lettres at the top of the literary heap in the United States.
Harris had done it. He had started Southern literature, his old boss J.A. Turner's dream come true at last. Thus, Joseph Addison Turner had indeed fathered Southern literature; he just didn't live long enough to see it. Three Not-So-Ordinary Joes is the at-long-last tribute to Turner for starting a great American literary genre, just as he had dreamed.
Published by NewSouth Books, 2018. To order from NewSouth Books, click here. You may also order from Barnes and Noble by clicking here, or from Amazon by clicking here.