author
Ruth McEnery Stuart
1856–1917
A vivid storyteller of Southern life, she built a national readership with warm, observant fiction and a sharp ear for regional speech. Her stories and poems often drew on Louisiana and Arkansas settings, blending humor, character, and everyday detail.
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
Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales
by Ruth McEnery Stuart
Gobolinks; or, Shadow Pictures for Young and Old
by Ruth McEnery Stuart, Albert Bigelow Paine
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 became known as an American writer of fiction and poetry whose work was closely tied to the post–Civil War South. Biographical sources disagree about her exact birth year, but the dates 1856–1917 are often used; she later wrote under the name Ruth McEnery Stuart.
She was educated in New Orleans, married Alfred Oden Stuart in 1879, and was widowed a few years later. After turning seriously to writing, she published stories that gained attention for their lively dialogue and closely observed portraits of Southern communities, with work appearing in major magazines and in books such as Uncle 'Lisha's Shop and The River's Children.
Stuart's writing earned readers in the United States and abroad, and she received honorary recognition from Tulane University late in life. She died in 1917, leaving behind a body of regional fiction that helped preserve voices, customs, and scenes from the nineteenth-century South.