Dorothy Scarborough

Dorothy Scarborough
Dorothy Scarborough, from a 1918 publication.
Born	(1878-01-27)January 27, 1878 Mount Carmel, Texas
Died	November 7, 1935(1935-11-07) (aged 57) New York City
Occupation	Writer professor literary critic
Literary movement	American folklore
Notable works	The Wind

Emily Dorothy Scarborough (January 27, 1878 – November 7, 1935) was an American writer who wrote about Texas, folk culture, cotton farming, ghost stories and women's life in the Southwest.

Early life

Scarborough was born in

Academics and writing

Even though Scarborough's writings are identified with Texas, she studied at

While receiving her PhD from Columbia, she wrote a dissertation, "The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction". Sylvia Ann Grider writes in a critical introduction that the dissertation "was so widely acclaimed by her professors and colleagues that it was published and it has become a basic reference work".^[1]

Dorothy Scarborough came in contact with many writers in New York, including Edna Ferber and Vachel Lindsay. She taught creative writing classes at Columbia. Among her creative writing students were Eric Walrond and Carson McCullers, who took her first college writing class from Scarborough.^[1]

Her most critically acclaimed book, The Wind (first published anonymously in 1925), was later made into a film of the same name starring Lillian Gish.

Bibliography

Original works

• Fugitive Verses (1912), original verses
• The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917); available in its entirety at Google Book Search
• From a Southern Porch (1919), viewable in full at Google Book Search or viewable at the Portal to Texas History
• Humorous Ghost Stories (1921) Free download from Project Gutenberg
• In the Land of Cotton (1923)
• The Wind (1925), considered her most acclaimed work.
• The Unfair Sex (serialized, 1925–26)
• Impatient Griselda (1927)
• Can't Get a Redbird (1929)
• Stretch-Berry Smile (1932)
• The Story of Cotton (1933) juvenile reader
• Selected Short Stories of Today (1935)

Folklore

• On the Trail of Negro Folk-songs (1925) available at archive.org
• Song Catcher in Southern Mountains; American Folk Songs of British Ancestry (1937, posthumous)

Biographical and critical essays

Biographical Essay on the Handbook of Texas Online Foreword to The Wind by Sylvia Ann Grider, Barker Texas History Center series, University of Texas Press, 1979.

References

Sources

• Dorothy Scarborough from the Handbook of Texas Online

External links

• Works by Dorothy Scarborough at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Dorothy Scarborough at Internet Archive
• Works by Dorothy Scarborough at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Dorothy Scarborough at the University of Houston site