MARY ELIZABETH WITHERSPOON

(June 14, 1919–)

A native of Florida, Mary Elizabeth Rhyne Witherspoon graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1941 with an A.B. in drama. “I'd intended to be an actress,” says Witherspoon, “but my collegiate studies in drama turned out to be training for writing fiction.” She married Jack Witherspoon, an engineer, in 1942, and the couple moved to Knoxville, Tennessee.

Witherspoon built a career as a freelance writer while raising three sons. In 1963, she earned a master's degree in history from the University of Tennessee and later served as a history instructor at the University of Tennessee and Knoxville College. Her work includes two novels, a history of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, a poetry collection, essays, and short stories.

“My first novel [Somebody Speak for Katy] was a case of ‘write what you know,’” Witherspoon says. “The Morning Cool [her second novel] was a case of ‘know what you write,’ which is more difficult.” Witherspoon's novel The Morning Cool focuses on the human cost of McCarthyism in 1950s America.

In this excerpt from The Morning Cool, we meet Maggie Cole, a forty-something widow whose husband, Chris Cole, had been active in radical circles during the 1930s and 1940s. An old friend, Joe, comes to visit, along with his mother, and brings Maggie disturbing news regarding Senator McCarthy's crusade to uncover American communists, and Maggie begins her own search for the truth behind her husband's suicide and his political past.

OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

PRIMARY

Novel: The Morning Cool (1972), Somebody Speak for Katy (1950). Nonfiction: “On Leaping from Rock to Rock with an Intellectual,” Whose Woods These Are, A History of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference (1993).

SECONDARY

Thomas Lask, “There's No Place to Hide,” New York Times (8 April 1972), 27.