Joan Williams (author)


Fiction writer Joan Williams was raised in Memphis, Tennessee. After schooling at the Miss Hutchinson School for Girls, she attended Bard College. During her time at Bard, Williams met and began a professional and personal relationship with novelist William Faulkner, a relationship that has overshadowed her own successful career as a novelist.

Writing career

Williams published her first stories while a student at Bard College. "Rain Later" received the College Fiction Prize from Mademoiselle, and four years later, she published a sequel in the same venue. These two stories together formed the nucleus of her first novel, "The Morning and the Evening," whose publication led novelist William Styron to call Williams a "greatly gifted writer."

Personal life

Williams and Faulkner's relationship was both personal and professional, but Williams never found the personal part of it satisfying: correspondence between the two writers shows Faulkner's ongoing frustration with Williams' ambivalence. In 1954, she married sportswriter and editor Ezra Bowen, whose mother was biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen. Williams and Bowen had two sons and three grand-daughters. From 1984 to 1994, she lived with Atlantic editor Seymour Lawrence, who had accepted a story of hers in 1952.

Works

Novels

The Morning and the Evening
Old Powder Man
The Wintering
Country Woman
Pay the Piper

Short Stories

"Rain Later," in Mademoiselle
"The Morning and the Evening," in Atlantic Monthly
Pariah and Other Stories

Non-fiction

"Twenty Will not Come Again," in Atlantic Monthly 245.5
"Sanctuary of the Storyteller: A New Orleans Couple Has Restored the House Where William Faulkner Became a Writer," in Southern Accents 15.3

Awards

College Fiction Prize, 1949
Best American Short Stories 1949
National Book Award for Fiction finalist, 1961
John P. Marquand First Novel Award, 1961
National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, 1962
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1988

Archives

Joan Williams's papers reside at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia