author
Ruth McEnery Stuart
1856–1917
A sharp-eyed Southern storyteller, this late-19th-century writer became known for short fiction that brought Louisiana and Arkansas voices, settings, and everyday lives onto the page. After being widowed, she turned seriously to writing and built a national literary career from New York.
6 Audiobooks
Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles
by Ruth McEnery Stuart
The River's Children: An Idyl of the Mississippi
by Ruth McEnery Stuart
Gobolinks; or, Shadow Pictures for Young and Old
by Ruth McEnery Stuart, Albert Bigelow Paine
Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales
by Ruth McEnery Stuart
Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches
by Ruth McEnery Stuart
Sonny, a Christmas Guest
by Ruth McEnery Stuart
About the author
Born Mary Routh McEnery in Marksville, Louisiana, Ruth McEnery Stuart wrote fiction, poetry, and books for children. Sources differ on her birth year, but they agree that she grew up in the post–Civil War South and drew deeply on the people and places she had known in Louisiana and Arkansas.
After marrying Alfred Oden Stuart in 1879, she lived in Arkansas; when he died a few years later, she eventually moved to New York and devoted herself to writing. Her stories appeared in major magazines, and she became especially known for local-color fiction shaped by Southern speech, humor, and domestic life.
Her work often focused on rural communities and everyday characters, and she published many books over the course of her career, including short-story collections and writing for younger readers. Today she is remembered as a distinctive regional voice whose work preserves a vivid, if historically complex, picture of Southern life in her era.