Julia Peterkin

Julia Peterkin (1880-1961), American novelist, who wrote about plantation life among black Americans during the early 20th century. Peterkin, the wife of a plantation manager, rejected the prevalent stereotypes of black Americans found in much Southern fiction of her time.

The daughter of a prominent physician, Peterkin was born Julia Mood in Laurens County, South Carolina. Her mother died soon after giving birth, and Peterkin was raised by a black nursemaid. She learned to speak Gullah—a patois (dialect other than the standard or literary dialect) of English and West African languages spoken by blacks in the coastal areas of South Carolina—before learning standard English. After earning a B.A. degree in 1896 and an M.A. degree in 1897 from Converse College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Peterkin began teaching at a rural school in Fort Motte, South Carolina. In 1903 she married William Peterkin, heir to the Lang Syne Plantation, one of the most prosperous plantations in the area, and took on managerial duties on the property that brought her in close contact with black farm workers.

When she was 40 years old, Peterkin began writing sketches based on her observations of black plantation life, eventually collecting some of them in Green Thursday (1924). The book was praised by black leaders such as American writer and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and by white liberals such as American poet Carl Sandburg. Peterkin's first novel, Black April (1927), drawing on the tragic story of the Lang Syne Plantation foreman, was praised by many Southerners and earned her an honorary doctoral degree from Converse College.

Continuing to draw from her experiences among black plantation workers, Peterkin wrote Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), whose religious heroine has eight illegitimate children. The novel was banned in many public libraries throughout the South, but the resulting controversy and the book's good reviews made it a best-seller, and Peterkin won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for the work. Peterkin's third novel, Bright Skin (1932), was not well received. She then published a few additional sketches in Roll, Jordan Roll (1933) and A Plantation Christmas (1934) before retiring from fiction writing.