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A More Perfect Union

The New Georgia Encyclopedia is supported by funding from A More Perfect Union, a special initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Sue Monk Kidd

Sue Monk Kidd

Sue Monk Kidd is the author of multiple novels, including The Secret Life of Bees and The Invention of Wings.

William Grimes

William Grimes

This portrait was published with the Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave. The book, the first slave narrative printed in the U.S., was first published in New York City in 1825.

Photograph from Dwight C. Kilbourne, The Bench and Bar of Litchfield County, Connecticut, 1709-1909: Biographical Sketches of Members, History and Catalogue of the Litchfield Law School Historical Notes

Savannah Rice Plantations, 1825

Savannah Rice Plantations, 1825

This map of Savannah River-area rice plantations was created in 1825, the same year William Grimes first published his narrative in New York City. Grimes served six enslavers in Savannah between 1811 and 1815 before escaping to freedom in New England.

Chatham County Map Portfolio, compiled by workers of the Writers program of the Works Projects Administration in the State of Georgia. Sponsored by the Georgia Society of the Colonial Dames of America.

Eliza Frances Andrews

Eliza Frances Andrews

Eliza Frances Andrews (pictured ca. 1879) was a writer of journals, novels, newspaper reports, botany articles and textbooks, and editorials. Her published diary, War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865, is one of the most compelling first-person accounts of the Civil War home front.

Courtesy of University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Lupton Library Special Collections

Eliza Frances Andrews

Eliza Frances Andrews

Image of Eliza Frances Andrews in the War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865, one of the most compelling first-person accounts of the Civil War (1861-65) home front, published in 1908. Eliza Frances Andrews was a writer, newspaper reporter, editor, columnist, social critic, scientist, and educator. By the time of her death in 1931 in Rome, Georgia, Andrews had written three novels, more than a dozen scientific articles on botany, two internationally recognized botany textbooks, and dozens of articles, commentaries, and reports on topics ranging from politics to environmental issues.

Image from The War Time Journal of a Georgia Girl (1908)

John Donald Wade

John Donald Wade

John Donald Wade posed for this portrait by Kate F. Edwards in the early 1910s. Wade, a great-great-grandson of John Adam Treutlen, the state's first governor, was an important participant in the Vanderbilt Agrarian movement of the 1930s. Also a noted biographer, Wade published works on the lives of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and John Wesley.

John Donald Wade

John Donald Wade

Native Georgian John Donald Wade contributed to I'll Take My Stand (1930), the manifesto of the Agrarian literary movement, while teaching at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1934 Wade returned to the University of Georgia, where his academic career began, and twelve years later founded the Georgia Review, a renowned literary journal.

From Selected Essays and Other Writings, edited by D. Davidson

Janisse Ray

Janisse Ray

Janisse Ray, a native of Baxley, is an environmental activist and award-winning author.

Photograph by Nancy Marshall

Lewis Grizzard

Lewis Grizzard

The country-boy perspective of Georgia-born humorist and best-selling author Lewis Grizzard shaped his reaction to all of his personal experiences even as he became a national and international celebrity. Grizzard published twenty-five books on a variety of subjects, from women and religion to golf and UGA football.

Melissa Fay Greene

Melissa Fay Greene

Melissa Fay Greene, a native of Macon, has written two award-winning books chronicling dramatic episodes in the civil rights movement in Georgia: Praying for Sheetrock (1991) and The Temple Bombing (1996).

Photograph from UGA Today

Frances Mayes

Frances Mayes

Mayes has achieved wide recognition for two best-selling books about her life and her second home in Italy: Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy and Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy.

Roy Blount Jr.

Roy Blount Jr.

Roy Blount Jr. is a humorist, journalist, sportswriter, poet, novelist, performer, editor, lyricist, lecturer, screenwriter, dramatist, and philologist. He recognizes and appreciates the comedic possibilities of the southern, and national, landscape.

Photograph from Roy Blount Jr.

Bailey White

Bailey White

White's stories and essays, including Sleeping at the Starlite Hotel (1995) and Quite a Year for Plums (1998), evoke a vivid picture of life in south Georgia.

Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin

Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin

Lumpkin is best known for her autobiographical novel, The Making of a Southerner (1947), which describes her transition from passive inheritance of white supremacy to conscious rejection of the racial values of a segregated South.

From The Making of a Southerner, by K. D. Lumpkin

Arthur Crew Inman

Arthur Crew Inman

Inman was a reclusive and unsuccessful poet whose 17-million word diary, extending from 1919 to 1963, provides a panoramic record of people, events, and observations from more than four decades of the twentieth century.

From From a Darkened Room, by D. Aaron

Evelyn Inman

Evelyn Inman

In 1923 Arthur Crew Inman married Evelyn Yates, who remained with him for the rest of his life. She occupies a prominent if not always hallowed place in the diary: "She is homely as a stump fence built in the dark," he wrote of her, "but she doesn't giggle all the time."

From From a Darkened Room, by D. Aaron