author
Dorothy Scarborough
1878–1935
A Texas-born writer, folklorist, and teacher, she explored the lives, stories, and songs of the American South and Southwest. Her work ranges from regional fiction to ghostly tales, with a lasting reputation built especially on The Wind and her early folklore collecting.
2 Audiobooks
Humorous Ghost Stories
by Dorothy Scarborough
The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction
by Dorothy Scarborough
About the author
Born in Mount Carmel, Texas, in 1878, Dorothy Scarborough studied at Baylor University and later taught there before continuing her education at the University of Chicago and Columbia. She went on to teach creative writing at Columbia University, building a career that joined academic life with popular writing.
Scarborough wrote novels, criticism, and folklore studies, often returning to Texas settings and to the pressures faced by women in Southern life. She is especially remembered for The Wind (1925), a stark novel of isolation on the plains, and for On the Trail of Negro Folksongs (1925), an early collection that helped preserve African American folk music and oral tradition.
She also had a strong interest in the supernatural and in storytelling itself, which can be seen in works such as Famous Modern Ghost Stories. That mix of regional detail, literary study, and folklore gives her books a distinctive place in early twentieth-century American writing.