author
Virginia Frazer Boyle
1863–1938
A prolific Southern writer of fiction, poetry, and essays, she published widely from the late 19th century into the early 20th. Her work often looked back to the antebellum South, making her a revealing and sometimes controversial literary voice of her era.
1 Audiobook
Devil tales
by Virginia Frazer Boyle
About the author
Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on February 14, 1863, and raised in Memphis after the Civil War, she went on to build a substantial literary career as an American author of prose and poetry. She wrote several novels and more than 100 poems, and her work appeared in popular magazines as well as in book form.
Her writing was deeply shaped by Southern memory and regional identity. Modern reference sources note that many of her poems and stories presented an idealized view of the plantation South, which has made her legacy more complicated for later readers even as it keeps her important to the study of Southern literature and culture.
She died on December 13, 1938. Today, she is remembered both for the scale of her output and for how clearly her writing reflects the values, nostalgia, and tensions of the world she wrote from.