Georgia Authors

Flannery O'Connor is Georgia's greatest writer — and arguably one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. She spent most of her life on her family's farm, Andalusia, outside Milledgeville, writing while fighting lupus. Her fiction is dark, comic, violent, and shot through with Catholic grace. She called it "Southern Gothic" before anyone else did. Start here if you start anywhere.

Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth child of sharecroppers. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Color Purple in 1983 — the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer for fiction. Her work transformed American literature and gave voice to experiences that had been silenced for generations.

Margaret Mitchell wrote one book — and it became one of the bestselling novels in history. Gone with the Wind, published in 1936, won the Pulitzer Prize and has never gone out of print. It's a complicated book about a complicated era, and its relationship to the Civil War and race deserves to be read alongside the historians and novelists who have complicated its legacy.

Carson McCullers published her first novel at twenty-three and never stopped astonishing. Her fiction is set in Georgia mill towns and small Southern cities, exploring loneliness, longing, and the search for human connection with a precision and empathy that feels almost supernatural. She was a contemporary and friend of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.

James Dickey was Georgia's poet laureate, an advertising man turned poet turned novelist who wrote one of the great American adventure novels. Deliverance — set on a river closely modeled on the Chattooga, which borders Rabun County just west of Toccoa — is both a thriller and a profound meditation on masculinity, wilderness, and civilization's thin skin.

Harris collected and published African American folk tales — the Uncle Remus stories — preserving oral traditions that might otherwise have been lost, though his framing of those tales has been rightly criticized by later generations. A complicated figure whose preservation work remains historically significant.

Olive Ann Burns grew up in Commerce, Georgia — not far from Toccoa — and spent twenty years writing Cold Sassy Tree, a warm and funny novel set in a small North Georgia town at the turn of the century. She finished it while battling cancer. It is one of the most beloved Georgia novels ever written.

Tayari Jones is one of the most important American novelists working today. Her novel An American Marriage won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2019 and was an Oprah's Book Club selection. Set in Atlanta, it's a devastating and humane examination of how the criminal justice system destroys Black families and marriages.

Ward is Mississippi-born but deeply connected to the Southern literary tradition that runs through Georgia. She has won the National Book Award twice — the only woman and first Black author to do so. Her work is essential reading for anyone who loves Southern fiction.

Mary Kay Andrews (pen name of Kathy Hogan Trocheck) is one of Georgia's most beloved popular fiction writers — funny, warm, and deeply rooted in Georgia. Her Savannah Blues series and beach reads have made her a perennial bestseller.

These non-fiction books are essential reading for understanding Georgia — its history, its people, and its place in American life.