Wilma Dykeman – författare

Had Will Alexander not shunned the limelight, he might already be a national legend, for he was one of the greatest white champions of the Negro cause in the South from 1915 to 1954. A farm boy who worked his way through Vanderbilt University and became a Methodist minister, he was a tireless enemy of the abuses, large and petty, which he saw around him. In 1919 Will Alexander helped establish the Commission on Interracial Co-operation in Atlanta. During the Depression he became assistant administrator of the Resettlement Administration and, later, director of the Farm Security Administration; under his supervision, the tide was finally turned against the spread of sharecropping. In World War II he served as adviser on minority problems to the War Manpower Commission. He was the driving force in founding Dillard and Atlanta universities. These were some of his achievements in public life. In addition, he helped and encouraged individual Negroes such as Marian Anderson, Ralphe Bunche, and Robert Weaver and influenced eminent white southerners, including Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, and Brooks Hays. His real impact must be measured also in the numbers of southerners giving leadership today who owe to him their start in the fight against prejudice.

Discovered as a typewritten manuscript only after her death in 2006,Family of Earth allows us to see into the mind of the young author andAppalachian native Wilma Dykeman (1920–2006), who would become oneof the American South’s most prolific and storied writers. Focusing on herchildhood in Buncombe County, Dykeman reveals a perceptive and sophisticatedunderstanding of human nature, the environment, and social justice.And yet, for her words’ remarkable polish, her voice still resonates as rawand vital. Against the backdrop of early twentieth-century life in Asheville,she chronicles the touching, at times harrowing, story of her family’s fortunes,plotting their rise and fall in uncertain economic times and endingwith her father’s sudden death in 1934 when she was fourteen years old.Featuring a foreword by fellow North Carolinian Robert Morgan, Familyof Earth stands as a new major literary work by a groundbreaking author.