A Devil and a Good Woman, Too: The Lives of Julia Peterkin

A Devil and a Good Woman, Too is the award-winning biography of a remarkably talented, enigmatic southern woman whose fiction about rural African Americans drew on her own emotional traumas and family scandals. A white plantation mistress who vowed to "write what is, even if it is unpleasant," Julia Peterkin produced five books that revolutionized American literature, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Scarlet Sister Mary. In the 1920s, Peterkin wrote stark, powerful stories that earned the praise of W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, and H. L. Mencken. But for reasons explored in this biography, she chose to stop writing at the height of a brilliant career and retreat to a provincial life rather than follow her characters as they moved away from the plantation.