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“There are these points in your life that are pivotal, and a lot depends on who you happen to run into at those points. . . . I went to Hollins. So it was like falling into a womb. It was very wonderful and supportive and there were all these other people with the same passions I had.”—Lee Smith By the late 1950s Hollins College had established itself as a nationally competitive academic institution. With the emergence of Louis D. Rubin, Jr.’s writing program, this southern women’s school launched some of the most powerful voices in contemporary literature. The careers of Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan, and Anne Goodwyn Jones (members of the class of ‘67) are representative of the impact the Hollins writing community has had. As Nancy C. Parrish illustrates in this engaging study, these women discovered support, kindred spirits, and new horizons at Hollins. They and many others found not simply a haven in which to mature but an arena in which ambitious, intelligent women tested themselves against their peers, their mentors, their culture, and their own prior self-definitions. From that boisterous and challenging atmosphere emerged women who have, in impressive numbers, molded writing careers according to their own visions and made striking contributions to the literary world, all while maintaining the critical and congenial ties formed while at Hollins. For Smith, Dillard, and their peers, these years were an active and complex gestation period for their themes and writing. Annie Dillard, fresh out of college, burst onto the literary scene with her Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Lee Smith—who wrote her first novel, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, while still at Hollins—has received significant critical attention for novels such as Fair and Tender Ladies and Oral History. Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan’s Daughters of Time and Anne Goodwyn Jones’s Tomorrow Is Another Day are recognized as major feminist studies of southern literature. In examining the institution’s history, the influence of significant mentors in the 1960s, and the writers themselves in the class of 1967, Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group provides an intriguing analysis of how one women's writing community coalesced, evolved, succeeded, and persevered.
Nancy C. Parrish is an adjunct instructor in history at Virginia State University and an English teacher in the Chesterfield Public School system.
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