By Jeanne Luckett. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 4)
Alice McDermott
National Book Award-winning novelist Alice McDermott will deliver the fourth annual Bettye Jolly Lecture at 4:00 p.m. Thursday (March 8) on the lawn at the Eudora Welty House and Garden, 1119 Pinehurst Street in Jackson.
McDermott’s eight novel, The Ninth Hour (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux), is a finalist for the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the Library Journal named it among 2017’s top 10 books of fiction.
The book begins with the story of a pregnant widow of a suicide victim whose newborn daughter is raised by the nuns of the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor. The movingly complex, lovingly crafted story of a family continues through another generation.
Heller McAlpin of National Public Radio contends that McDermott “has made the insular world of New York’s Irish Catholic immigrants in the first half of the 20th century her own.” Mary Gordon of the New York Times notes that although McDermott is “known and admired for her portrayal of Irish-American family life, she has now extended her range and deepened it.”
McDermott grew up on Long Island, the daughter of first-generation Irish American parents, and attended Catholic all-girls school. She loved books and began writing at an early age, completing a novel at age 11.
Determined to pursue a writing career and teach English, she attended State University of New York, Oswego, where she was a student of Suzanne Marrs before Marrs, professor emerita of English at Millsaps College, moved to Jackson.
At Oswego, one of her professors assured her that she was a writer. She completed her M.A. in writing at the University of New Hampshire in 1978 and sold her first short story that year. She says that getting that encouragement changed her life and made her want to teach, “just to have the opportunity to do the same.”
She has melded her writing career with teaching and today is the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanitites at Johns Hopkins University.
McDermott cites Welty as a role model during her formative years. “Welty was, in many ways, the first living woman writer I encountered, a literary figure as formidable and esteemed as any of her male contemporaries,” she notes. “This was delightful to me because her work was so good and wide-ranging.”
Sponsored by the Eudora Welty Foundation and the Millsaps College English Department’s Visiting Writers Series, the program is free and open to the public. Following the lecture, a book sale and signing and a reception will be held in the Welty Education and Visitors Center next door. In the event of inclement weather, the lecture and reception will be held in Room 215 of the Millsaps College Gertrude C. Ford Academic Complex.
The lecture honors the late Bettye Jolly, a longtime docent at the Eudora Welty House and leading member of a book club that grew out of a seminar at Millsaps taught by Welty scholar Marrs. The book club founded the endowed lecture to encourage reading, and it is supported through designated gifts to the Welty Foundation.
McDermott is one of the nation’s most celebrated authors. She received the National Book Award in 1998 for Charming Billy. After This, At Weddings and Wakes, and That Night were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her literary awards include the Whiting Writers Award, the Carrington Award for Literary Excellence, and F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for American Literature.
Jeanne Luckett is a communications consultant to the Eudora Welty Foundation.
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