Jessica Lucy "Decca" Treuhaft was an English author, one of the six aristocratic Mitford sisters noted for their sharply conflicting politics.
Diana, Lady Mosley, known as Diana Guinness between 1929 and 1936, was a British aristocrat, writer, editor and fascist sympathiser. She was one of the Mitford sisters and the wife of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.
Lenoir is a city in and the county seat of Caldwell County, North Carolina, United States. The population was 18,263 at the 2020 census. Lenoir is located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. To the northeast are the Brushy Mountains, a spur of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Hibriten Mountain, located just east of the city limits, marks the western end of the Brushy Mountains range.
Patricia Cornwell is an American crime writer. She is known for her best-selling novels featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, of which the first was inspired by a series of sensational murders in Richmond, Virginia, where most of the stories are set. The plots are notable for their emphasis on forensic science, which has influenced later TV treatments of police work. Cornwell has also initiated new research into the Jack the Ripper killings, incriminating the popular British artist Walter Sickert. Her books have sold more than 120 million copies.
Charlotte's Web is a book of children's literature by American author E. B. White and illustrated by Garth Williams. It was published on October 15, 1952, by Harper & Brothers. The novel tells the story of a livestock pig named Wilbur and his friendship with a barn spider named Charlotte. When Wilbur is in danger of being slaughtered by the farmer, Charlotte writes messages in her web praising Wilbur, such as "Some Pig", "Terrific", "Radiant", and "Humble", to persuade the farmer to let him live.
Carson McCullers was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small town of the Southern United States. Her other novels have similar themes. Most are set in the Deep South.
Robert Newton Peck was an American author who specialized in children's and young adult literature. His works include A Day No Pigs Would Die, Millie's Boy, and the Soup series.
Violet Trefusis was an English socialite and author. She is chiefly remembered for her lengthy affair with the writer Vita Sackville-West that both women continued after their respective marriages. It was featured in novels by both parties; in Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography; and in many letters and memoirs of the period roughly from 1912 to 1922. She may have been the inspiration for aspects of the character Lady Montdore in Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate and of Muriel in Harold Acton's The Soul's Gymnasium (1982).
Dawn Powell was an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. Known for her acid-tongued prose, "her relative obscurity was likely due to a general distaste for her harsh satiric tone." Nonetheless, Stella Adler and author Clifford Odets appeared in one of her plays. Her work was praised by Robert Benchley in The New Yorker and in 1939 she was signed as a Scribner author where Maxwell Perkins, famous for his work with many of her contemporaries, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, became her editor. A 1963 nominee for the National Book Award, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement in literature the following year. A friend to many literary and arts figures of her day, including author John Dos Passos, critic Edmund Wilson, and poet E.E. Cummings, Powell's work received renewed interest after Gore Vidal praised it in a 1987 editorial for The New York Review of Books. Since then, the Library of America has published two collections of her novels.
Elizabeth Yates McGreal was an American writer. She may have been known best for the biographical novel Amos Fortune, Free Man, winner of the 1951 Newbery Medal. She had been a Newbery runner-up in 1944 for Mountain Born. She began her writing career as a journalist, contributing travel articles to The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times. Many of her books were illustrated by the British artist Nora S. Unwin.
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle is a historical novel by the American author Avi published in 1990. The book is marketed towards children at a reading level of grades 5–8. The book chronicles the evolution of the title character as she is pushed outside her naive existence and learns about life aboard a ship crossing from England to America in 1832. The novel was well received and won several awards, including being named as a Newbery Honor book in 1991.
Virginia Episcopal School (VES) is a private, co-educational college preparatory, boarding and day school for students in grades 9 - 12, located in Lynchburg, Virginia, United States. The school was first conceived in 1906 by the Reverend Robert Carter Jett, and opened its doors to students in September 1916. Virginia Episcopal School's 160-acre (0.65 km2) campus is located above the James River in Lynchburg along the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Denise Giardina is an American novelist. Her book Storming Heaven was a Discovery Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and received the 1987 W. D. Weatherford Award for the best published work about the Appalachian South. The Unquiet Earth received an American Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award for fiction. Her 1998 novel Saints and Villains was awarded the Boston Book Review fiction prize and was semifinalist for the International Dublin Literary Award. Giardina is an ordained Episcopal Church deacon, a community activist, and a former candidate for governor of West Virginia.
John Crosby was an American newspaper columnist, radio-television critic, novelist and TV host. After winning a Personal Peabody Award for his radio criticism in 1946, he became a member of the Peabody Awards Board of Jurors, serving from 1947 to 1962. During the 1950s, he was generally regarded as the leading critic of television. The latter notwithstanding he was unable to arrest the exponential growth in the viewership of telecasts headlining Elvis Presley, who he attacked viciously in a June 18, 1956 article entitled “Performer's Gyrations May Doom Rock 'n Roll". Although the article had been written in response to Presley's 2nd appearance on the Milton Berle Show, which drew 22.1 million viewers, Presley followed it by appearing, this time at the most coveted moment in prime time television, the Sunday at 8pm slot, and did so at both the Steve Allen and Ed Sullivan shows where he garnered 42.1, 60.7, 56.5 and 54.5 million viewers for NBC and CBS, respectively.
Virginia Ragsdale was a teacher and mathematician specializing in algebraic curves. She is most known as the creator of the Ragsdale conjecture.
The Famous Writers School was an educational institution that ran a correspondence course for writers in the 1960s and 1970s. Founded in 1961 by Bennett Cerf, Gordon Carroll, and Albert Dorne, it became the subject of a scandal after a 1970 exposé by Jessica Mitford, who noted the school's questionable academic and business practices.
The Mitford Years is a series of fourteen novels by American writer Jan Karon, set in the fictional town of Mitford, North Carolina. The novels are Christian-themed, and center on the life of the rector, Father Tim.
Nancy Hale was an American novelist and short-story writer. She received the O. Henry Award, a Benjamin Franklin magazine award, and the Henry H. Bellaman Foundation Award for fiction.
Matilda Bradford "Tillie" Ehringhaus was an American civic leader who, as the wife of John C. B. Ehringhaus, served as First Lady of North Carolina from 1933 to 1937. Since her time in the North Carolina Executive Mansion was marked by the Great Depression, she made budget cuts and adaptations around the mansion to save money for the state, including having the wattage of the chandeliers lowered so that the electric bill would not exceed monthly expenses. As first lady, she hosted musical salons and was noted for her beauty and charm. After her husband's death, Ehringhaus co-edited the North Carolina Almanac and State Industrial Guide and, in 1952, served as an alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention.
Vance Havner was an American Southern Baptist minister, evangelist, and author.
