Name Mary Brown Role Short story writer | Education Judson Female College | |
![]() | ||
Awards Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award Books Tongues of Flame, It wasn't all dancing - and other, Fanning the spark |
Bookmark with don noble mary ward brown
Mary Ward Brown (June 18, 1917 - May 14, 2013) was an American short-story writer and memoirist.
Contents

Early life
Brown was born on June 18, 1917 in Hamburg, Alabama. She graduated from Judson College.
Career
Her first collection of short stories, Tongues of Flame, published in 1986, won the PEN/Hemingway (1987), the Alabama Author Award (1987), the Lillian Smith Book Award (1991), and the Hillsdale Fiction Prize (2003). Following her second collection of short stories, It Wasn't All Dancing, published in 2002, Brown was awarded the Alabama Library Author Award (2003), the Hillsdale Award for Fiction (2003), and the Harper Lee Award (2002). Paul Theroux has said of her writing that it was "...direct, unaffected, unsentimental,and powerful for its simplicity and for its revealing the inner life of rural Alabama...". Her story "Cure" was included in The Best American Short Stories 1984 (edited by John Updike & Shannon Ravenel).Southern journalist John S. Sledge called Brown "our genius, our Chekov".
Books
Death
Brown died on May 14, 2013.