Shirley Ann Grau: The Newcomb Girl Who Won the Pulitzer

The Newcomb Girl Who Won the Pulitzer

Shirley Ann Grau was born on July 8, 1929, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and grew up between the Crescent City and Alabama. She attended Sophie Newcomb College at Tulane University, graduating in 1950 with a degree that launched one of the most distinguished literary careers in Southern fiction. New Orleans was her home base, and the Deep South was her canvas.

Her first book, The Black Prince, a collection of short stories published in 1955, was nominated for the National Book Award. She was twenty-five years old and already writing with a precision and emotional depth that put her in the company of writers twice her age. The stories explored the Louisiana and Alabama landscape with a realist eye — race, gender, death, and the unspoken rules that governed Southern life.

The Keepers of the House

In 1965, Grau won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Keepers of the House, a novel about an illegal interracial marriage and its devastating consequences when exposed. The book was ahead of its time — a Southern white woman writing unflinchingly about miscegenation, racial hypocrisy, and the violence that erupts when a community's secrets are dragged into daylight. It was brave, beautifully written, and essential.

Grau continued writing novels and short story collections through 2006 — a career spanning more than five decades. She lived in Metairie with her husband, Tulane philosophy professor James Feibleman, and raised four children while maintaining a literary output that would have been impressive for a writer with no other responsibilities.

A Quiet Giant

Shirley Ann Grau died on August 3, 2020, at ninety-one. She was a Newcomb girl, a Pulitzer winner, and one of the most important Southern writers of the twentieth century. She wrote about the South the way it needed to be written about — with honesty, complexity, and a refusal to look away from the uncomfortable truths that make the region what it is.