- Born: October 31, 1880
- Birthplace: South Carolina
- Died: 1961
Julia Mood Peterkin won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1929 for her feminist comedy Scarlet Sister Mary. Raised by a Gullah-speaking nurse in South Carolina, Peterkin was a native speaker of the language, and wrote with a richness of texture that was not found in works by white authors. She was praised for avoiding the racist stereotypes that other white writers commonly employed when writing of black culture.
In the mid-1930s, Peterkin was employed by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Projects Administration (WPA) to collect folklore from the African Americans in her community and white communities on Waccamaw Neck and Sandy Island in Georgetown County, and the Freewoods and Holmestown Road in Horry County, just up the Waccamaw River, from Murrells Inlet. There were many more African Americans in those communities than there were whites, and Peterkin's interviews with former slaves who told their experiences, and younger storytellers who told whimsical animal stories and tales of local legends, were all preserved in Fort Motte's South Caroliniana Library and in the Library of Congress.
Most Famous Works
- Green Thursday (1924)
- Bright Skin: A Novel (1927)
- Black April: A Novel (1927)
- Scarlet Sister Mary (1928)
- Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933)
- Collected Short Stories of Julia Peterkin (1970)
