Contact: Maridith Geuder
STARKVILLE, Miss.--A South Carolina-based literary scholar of Southern authors will speak Thursday [Oct. 27] at Mississippi State.
Anne Blythe Meriwether, who has written about William Faulkner, William Gilmore Simms and others, will be featured as part of the 2005 Distinguished Lecture Series of the university's Institute for the Humanities. The public program begins at 4 p.m. in the Parker Ballroom of the Hunter Henry Center.
"Elizabeth Allston Pringle: South Carolina Woman Rice Planter" will be the topic. Pringle, who also was a diarist, gained fame in the early 20th century for her accounts of Low Country life written for the New York Sun under the pseudonym of Patience Pennington.
An independent scholar residing in Columbia, Meriwether currently is writing a biography of Pringle, who was born in the mid-19th century and lived until 1921. In addition to the in-progress work, she earlier published an annotated edition of Pringle's book, "A Woman Rice Planter" (University of South Carolina Press).
Meriwether first gained attention as an editor when she discovered the lost manuscript for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' first book, "Blood of My Blood."
First submitted for a 1929 Atlantic Monthly contest, the manuscript had been lost among Rawlings' papers. In 2002, Meriwether published a critical edition of "Blood" with the University of Florida Press.
For more information about the program, telephone Gary Myers of the College of Arts and Sciences at (662) 325-2646.