Dorothy Scarborough

Dorothy Scarborough
Born	January 27, 1878(1878-01-27) Mount Carmel, Texas
Died	November 7, 1935(1935-11-07) (aged 57) New York City, New York
Occupation	Writer, professor and literary critic
Literary movement	American folklore
Notable work(s)	The Wind
Influences , , , ,
Influenced Carson McCullers, , , , , ,

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

Early life

Scarborough was born in Mount Carmel, Texas. At the age of four she moved to Sweetwater, Texas for her mother's health, as her mother needed the drier climate. The family soon left Sweetwater in 1887, so that the Scarborough children could get a good education at Baylor College.

Academics and Writing

Even though Scarborough's writings are identified with Texas, she studied at University of Chicago and Oxford University and beginning in 1916 taught literature at Columbia University.

While receiving her PhD from Columbia, she wrote a dissertation, "The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917)". Sylvia Ann Grider writes in a critical introduction ^[1] the dissertation "was so widely acclaimed by her professors and colleagues that it was published and it has become a basic reference work."

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, was later made into a film of the same name starring Lilian Gish.

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) edited
• In the Land of Cotton (1923)
• On the Trail of Negro Folksongs (1925) available at archive.org
• 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)
• Song Catcher in Southern Mountains; American Folk Songs of British Ancestry (1937, posthumous)

Works by Dorothy Scarborough at Project Gutenberg:

• Famous Modern Ghost Stories at Project Gutenberg; edited by Dorothy Scarborough, with critical introduction

Biographical/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.

Footnotes

1. ^ ^{a b} Foreword to The Wind by Sylvia Ann Grider, Barker Texas History Center series, University of Texas Press, 1979.

References

Dorothy Scarborough from the Handbook of Texas Online

Persondata
Name	Scarborough, Dorothy
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	January 27, 1878
Place of birth	Mount Carmel, Texas
Date of death	November 7, 1935
Place of death	New York City, New York