Joan Williams Papers

Joan Williams (1928−2004) was born on September 26, 1928, in Memphis, Tennessee, as the only child of Maud Moore Williams (1903−1997) and Priestly Howard “P. H.” Williams (1895−1955). She attended the Miss Hutchison School for Girls in Memphis and earned her bachelor’s degree from Bard College in 1950. In the summer of 1949, Williams’s writing career began in earnest when she won the Mademoiselle College Fiction Prize for her short story, “Rain Later.” She went on to publish a number of works, including the novels The Morning and the Evening (1961), Old Powder Man (1966), The Wintering (1971), County Woman (1982), and Pay the Piper (1988). She also published short stories, including the collected volume Pariah and Other Stories (1983). In the later part of Williams’s life, she wrote in the short story and nonfiction genres; these works were posthumously brought together in Lisa C. Hickman's Remembering: Joan Williams's Uncollected Pieces (New York: Open Road Distribution, 2015).

Williams was inspired to write stories set in the rural Mississippi countryside she often visited, particularly Tate County, “where her maternal grandmother, Arvenia Moore, and other relatives lived” (Mississippi Encyclopedia). In Williams’s own words, “While I grew up in Memphis, it … [was] never … my bent to write about city life. It was the [southern] landscape that sparked me: country roads, dust rising, farming talk…. quiet stories about quiet people” (“Joan Williams: Struggling Fiction Writer”). Williams, a white woman, also noted, “The years of the civil rights movement were rewarding years for me, since I could sit in a rural store and listen to people talk about what was passing away that had been in place for a hundred years.” (“Joan Williams: Struggling Fiction Writer”).

Williams received national recognition for her contributions to southern literature during her lifetime. Her debut novel The Morning and the Evening earned widespread critical acclaim when it was published in 1961. In 1962, she received the John P. Marquand First Novel Award from the Book-of-the-Month Club and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Also in 1962, Williams received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1988, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction writing.

Williams’s achievements over the course of her literary career have often been unfairly conflated with and overshadowed by her association with William Faulkner (1897−1962). The two authors of southern literature had a complex relationship marked by the extreme power imbalance of Faulkner’s fame and literary success and Williams’s literary ambitions and youth. She was twenty years old, and Faulkner was fifty-one and married when they met in 1949 and started a relationship. From the beginning, Faulkner pressured Williams for a sexual relationship, but Williams wanted friendship and mentorship, a reality which ended any sustainable romantic relationship by 1953 (Hickman, William Faulkner and Joan Williams, p. 9−11). In 1954, Williams married her contemporary, the sportswriter and editor Ezra Bowen, and they had two sons. However, she and Faulkner continued to see each other and exchange letters until his death in 1962.

After divorcing Bowen in 1970, Williams was married to John Fargason from 1970 to 1981. She subsequently had a longterm relationship with Atlantic editor Seymour Lawrence from 1984 until his death in 1994. Williams died on April 11, 2004.

Sources

Hickman, Lisa C. “Joan Williams (1928−2004), Writer.” Mississippi Encyclopedia. July 11, 2017. https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/joan-williams/.

Hickman, Lisa C. “Tiger Lady: On Joan Williams,” Los Angeles Review of Books. December 11, 2011. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/tiger-lady-on-joan-williams/#!.

Hickman, Lisa C. William Faulkner and Joan Williams: The Romance of Two Writers. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006. [Call Number: PS3511 .A86Z4 .H485 W5 2006]

Mississippi Writers and Musicians. n.d. “Joan Williams,” Accessed August 1, 2024. https://www.mswritersandmusicians.com/mississippi-writers/joan-williams.

Wikipedia. n.d. “Joan Williams (author).” Accessed August 1, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Williams_(author).

Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. n.d. “Joan Williams.” Accessed August 2, 2024. https://www.gf.org/fellows/joan-williams/.

National Book Foundation. n.d. “The Morning and the Evening: Finalist, National Book Awards 1962 for Fiction, Joan Williams.” Accessed August 2, 2024. https://www.nationalbook.org/books/the-morning-and-the-evening/.

Williams, Joan. “Joan Williams: Struggling Fiction Writer.” Interview by Patrick H. Samway. America, December 31, 1988: 544−545 and 549. [Call Number: PS3573 .I4494 Z678 1988]