OLIVE TILFORD DARGAN [FIELDING BURKE]

(January 11, 1869–January 22, 1968)

Olive Tilford Dargan's literary career spanned half a century and embraced numerous genres, including poetry, drama, short stories, and novels. Dargan was born on a farm near Litchfield, Kentucky, and spent her early childhood there. When she was ten, her schoolteacher parents moved the family to Missouri. Dargan earned a degree from Peabody College in Nashville and subsequently taught in Arkansas, Texas, and Nova Scotia.

From 1893 to 1894, she attended Radcliffe, where she met Harvard student Pegram Dargan, whom she married in 1898. While in Boston, Dargan worked as a secretary for the president of a small company being taken over by the United States Rubber Company. The experience gave her an insider's view of big business, and the material she gathered during this time figures prominently in her fiction.

In 1906, Dargan and her husband bought a farm in Swain County, North Carolina, which was paid for by income from her writing. Dargan's reputation was initially based on her poetry, including Path Flower and The Cycle's Rim, a tribute to her husband, who drowned in 1915.

A recurring theme in Dargan's later work was the exploitation of Southern workers by American industry. In the 1930s and 1940s, using the pen name Fielding Burke, she wrote several novels exploring the inhumanity of America's economic system. As New York Times literary critic Donald Adams noted, “there is no hatred of capitalists in her conviction that the capitalist system must end; simply an overwhelming sympathy for those whom the system crushes.”

From 1925 until her death in 1968, Dargan made her home in Asheville, North Carolina, though she continued to travel extensively in the United States and Europe. Dargan's final book, Innocent Bigamy and Other Stories, was a short story collection published when she was ninety-six.

In her novel Call Home the Heart (written under her pseudonym, Fielding Burke), Dargan describes the plight of Ishma Waycaster, a mountain woman who, along with her husband, Britt, struggles valiantly to make a living on her mother Laviny's worn-out family farm. Ishma, who is expecting her first child, resents the lazy ways of her brother-in-law Jim, her sister Bainie, and their seven children.

OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

PRIMARY

Novels: Sons of the Stranger (1947), From My Highest Hill (1941), A Stone Came Rolling (1935), Call Home the Heart (1932), Highland Annals (1925). Drama: The Flutter of the Gold-leaf, and Other Plays (1922), The Mortal Gods and Other Plays (1912). Poetry: The Spotted Hawk (1958), The Cycle's Rim (1916), Path Flower and Other Verses (1914). Short stories: Innocent Bigamy and Other Stories (1962).

SECONDARY

Contemporary Authors, Vol. 111, 132. Nancy Carol Joyner, “Olive Tilford Dargan,” Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995), 233–34. Virginia Terrell Lathrop, “Olive Tilford Dargan,” N.C. Libraries 18 (spring 1960), 68–76. New York Times [obituary] (24 January 1968), 45, col. 1. Richard Walser, “Olive Tilford Dargan,” Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary (1979), 113–14.