Short Stories from the Old North State by Richard Walser

Author:Richard Walser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1959-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

LUCY DANIELS

As granddaughter of Josephus Daniels, journalist and historian and biographer, and as daughter of Jonathan Daniels, also journalist and historian and biographer but novelist too, Lucy Cathcart Daniels took to writing quite naturally. At the “ripe old age” of fifteen, she had a short story, “Good-bye, Bobbie,” accepted by the magazine Seventeen. It appeared in the issue of December, 1949. She had, of course, been writing for a long time before then.

She was born in Raleigh in 1934, and there she grew up. At the George School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which she attended for three years, she was assistant editor of the yearbook. It was during this time that she began teaching herself to write. When illness kept her from a college career, she intently pursued her course of self-training. Later in New York, where she went for hospitalization, she took a job with Reader’s Digest. Back home, well again and eager to work, she became a reporter for the Raleigh Times.

In 1956, her novel Caleb, My Son appeared. It was an immediate success. Actually, says Miss Daniels, “I wasn’t writing the book to be published. I was still teaching myself to write.” But when her father suggested that she send it to a publisher to see what would happen, his prediction that it would be published was correct. A racial study of the struggle between a conservative Negro father and his proud son, the book caught the temper of the times, disturbed as they were by the Supreme Court decision on school segregation.

In 1957, Lucy Daniels received a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing. Already she was engaged to be married to Thomas Patrick Inman, a newspaper photographer. Thus, at the same time, she began her first year of marriage and her “year off” writing on a second novel.

Later, writing activity moderated somewhat when, on December 17, 1958, a son was born, Patrick Benton Inman.

Her short story “Half a Lavender Ribbon” is one of a number she has written. In it the unrealized daydreams of a child have tragic consequences. It was published in the winter, 1958, number of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Asked to express her ideas on writing, Lucy Daniels explained: “I have none. . . . I write about people—human people. . . . I think you simply write what you have to write.”

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